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Weekly Worker 544 Thursday September 16 2004
Communist Party of Turkey
One state, one party
Saturday September 11 saw a meeting to celebrate the 84th anniversary
of the foundation of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) at London’s
Marx Memorial Library.
The Party was declared illegal virtually from the first. Nevertheless
the TKP has played an unmistakable role in the life of Turkey. In the
late 1960s it began to assume a mass character. Today’s continuation
comes from the left and a split with the ‘officials’ in the
mid-1970s. The entire British committee - which published the paper Workers’
Voice - and all those in Germany and Turkey itself who dared express sympathy
with it were unilaterally expelled by the now liquidated Moscow-backed
leadership.
The British committee - the third largest TKP organisation - insisted
that the revolutionary situation then gripping Turkey could be resolved
in one of two ways - either positively by revolution or negatively by
counterrevolution. The ‘officials’ sought a retreat from the
dilemma by turning more and more towards reformism. However, in September
1980 the army staged its counterrevolutionary coup. Then began the criticism
of weapons and the arrest of communists, revolutionary socialists and
Kurdish left nationalists. Under these tragic circumstances the Workers’
Voice wing questioned not only the ‘official’ leadership but
the entire strategy of the Soviet Union going back to Stalin’s time.
It was this wing of the TKP which helped inspire those who rebelled in
the ‘official’ CPGB and conducted their relentless ideological
battle through The Leninist - launched in November 1981. In 1991 these
comrades reclaimed the name of the CPGB and now publish the Weekly Worker.
The TKP has gone through a deep crisis in recent times, its British organisation
losing all community support as well as suffering splinters and splits.
Thus the September 11 rally was seen as marking something of a relaunch,
with a variety of communist parties and left groups invited to attend.
However, although several sent messages of solidarity, only four attended
the 40-strong event: the Communist Parties of Sudan and Bangladesh, the
Democratic Socialist Party (Australia) and the CPGB.
It was, then, something of an eclectic mix, which in one sense reminded
this writer of the kind of international gatherings organised by ‘official
communism’ before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rashid El Sheikh
from the CP of Sudan and Golam Mostafa from the CP of Bangladesh gave
what passed for an analysis of the situation in their respective countries,
ending their speeches with cries of “Long live the Communist Party
of Turkey!”
Julian Coppens of the DSP, who wore a Respect T-shirt, turned out to be
a temporary resident of Hackney. After informing comrades that it was
DSP policy to forge links with Marxist groups of whatever type across
the world, he too gave a run-down of the political situation in his country.
A TKP comrade read out an official statement which related the history
of his party, beginning with the massacre of founding members returning
from the famous Baku conference of 1920. The Communist International had
also secured the attendance of Turkish nationalists at Baku, the comrade
explained, and it was these very people who treacherously ordered the
murder of the communists.
The tendency of Soviet communists to form alliances with other class forces
at the expense of their own comrades was a theme of this part of his speech.
After World War II the Soviet bureaucracy aided Turkish industry, even
though the Turkish bourgeoisie allowed the placing of US nuclear weapons
directed against the USSR on its soil. The Soviet press even greeted the
army junta in 1980 as a “bulwark against terrorism”, said the
comrade.
After a brief résumé of the current situation in Turkey,
he concluded with the observation that in today’s circumstances it
was wrong to “repeat old slogans and failed programmes”. Quite
right. But he did not outline the new direction it was necessary to take.
Comrade Mark Fischer was introduced as someone who would “tell us
about the situation in Britain”. This was ironic, given that many
of the Turkish comrades in the room had lived in London longer than any
of the CPGB comrades present. In fact comrade Fischer declined the invitation
and spoke instead about the “profound political crisis” that
had overtaken not only ‘official communism’, but the entire
working class movement since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Comrade Fischer called for a “radical purging of false ideas from
Marxism”. That had to include the recognition that from 1928 and
the first five-year plan the USSR was no longer any kind of a workers’
state. We have to rid ourselves of all notions that the dictatorship of
the proletariat can mean anything else other than the democratic rule
of the working class and its allies.
Nor should proletarian internationalism preclude comradely criticism.
On the contrary, he said, “communists need to be brutally honest
with each other”. The criticism he was making of the TKP comrades
who have lived in Britain for more than a generation is that they had
not assimilated into British life in a fully revolutionary way. For example,
they could have, and should have, joined the Socialist Alliance and then
Respect alongside the CPGB. Exile politics is notoriously fractious, debilitating
and ultimately sterile. Apart from exceptional circumstances and exceptional
people - editors, members of a central committee, etc - migrants should
be encouraged to take up the class war in their adopted country and thereby
enrich its culture and political life.
The message was clear: communists must first and foremost unite to fight
the ruling class in the country where they find themselves - that is an
internationalist duty.
Peter Manson
