All Power to the Turkish People! Smash the Comprador Turkish State!

Mainly from our in-progress book

April 24th was the 51st anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML), and it is also the 51st anniversary of the Turkish people’s war’s initiation. We will briefly go over the history of this people’s war, mainly covering its complicated nature and the numerous splits it has had.

After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, the imperialists of the Allied Powers (specifically the UK, France, and Italy) occupied Turkey. The comprador bourgeoisie, which ruled the Ottoman Empire, fought this occupation, but later negotiated with the occupiers, allowing themselves to make Turkey a semi-colony rather than a direct colony. This Republic of Turkey initially relied on the support of the Kurdish nation, but following “independence”, the state suppressed Kurdish independence movements. Many “progressives” took the side of the fascist Turkish state in its oppression of the Kurdish nation. In response, genuine communists in Turkey took the side of the Kurdish people against both Turkey’s national oppression of the Kurds and the class oppression of the people by Kurdish comprador capitalists and landlords. Therefore, the national liberation of the Kurds and the war of the Turkish people came together.

The “Revolutionary Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Turkey” (“TİİKP” in Turkish) was the party that Turkish communists were part of prior to the revolution, and they had to leave the party due to its revisionism and its incorrect positions on the Kurdish national question. İbrahim Kaypakkaya exposed the party’s revisionism in “The Origin and Development of the Differences Between Ourselves and Shafak Revisionism”:

The struggle continuing within the Shafak movement, previously the PDA (Proletarian Revolutionary Daylight?), between the two wings, sometimes in the open, sometimes clandestine, sometimes hardening, sometimes softening, but continuing without a break has finally reached the point where it is no longer possible for the two wings to exist within the same organization. The proletarian wing has now cut all ties with the revisionist-bourgeois clique and embarked on reorganizing on Marxist-Leninist base …

In the international sphere they [the revisionists] adopted a centrist position as regards the situation between the world communist movement and modern revisionists. The fact that in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries the revisionists had once again taken power and that proletarian dictatorship had turned into bourgeois dictatorship was rejected. They particularly dismissed the idea that in the Soviet Union revisionism had turned into social-imperialism. They rejected the experiences of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. They adopted the path of maintaining friendly relations with both socialism and modern revisionism led by the Soviet revisionist clique. It was accepted that the USSR and other revisionist parties had committed the occasional error (!). (Like the ones they committed!). The bourgeois club that was later to be called the TIIKP emerged on this ideological basis. …

…[I]n the TIIKP Draft Programme there is not one word regarding guerrilla activity. It is impossible to come across the idea that today the primary form of armed struggle will be guerrilla warfare. There is merely mention of a vague struggle that village committees (?) will manage and direct. …

The mechanic bourgeois mentality and false logic shows itself on the question of armed struggle, as it does on many questions. The Shafak revisionists assume they will be able to make the popular masses advance on the path of armed struggle by showing them where to step like trained monkeys! It’s forbidden to step there! Don’t touch there! Don’t strike this! Don’t break that! Not armed struggle, walking on a high wire!

… [A]s a means of building up strength guerrilla actions in the cities may and should be initiated. For this purpose, just as banks may be robbed, that is, the government or reactionaries’ money may be appropriated, class enemies may be eliminated. For instance, police agents, fascist officers, police torturers, ringleaders of fascist organizations, brutal bosses and their lackeys, scabs, agent provocateurs, informers, those who shoot revolutionaries and impose death sentences on them, agents of imperialists, etc. may be shot. Also, communication lines may be sabotaged, ammunition stores and military depots may be raided or sabotaged, important documents appropriated or destroyed. People may be sprung from prison. Sabotage may be carried out at certain military bases and headquarters, police headquarters, fascist organizations’ main buildings, etc.

Our revisionist gentlemen reject all of these. Is there a better example than this of the fact that they understand the armed struggle in the manner criticized and condemned by comrade Lenin as “stuck up and stupid”‘?

[Source]

Kaypakkaya also showed the incorrect stance of the old party on the national question in Turkey in his classic essay, On the National Question:

According to Safak Revisionism, national oppression applies to the Kurdish people. This is to not understand the meaning of national oppression. National oppression is the oppression imposed by the ruling classes of ruling, oppressing and exploiting nations on the downtrodden, dependent subject nations. In Turkey national oppression is the oppression applied by the ruling classes of the dominant Turkish nation on the entire Kurdish nation, not just the Kurdish people, and also not solely on the Kurdish nation, but on all minority subject nations.

People and nation are not the same things. The concept of people today covers the working class, poor and middle peasantry semi-proletarians and the urban petit bourgeoisie. In backward countries, the revolutionary wing of the national bourgeoisie, which takes its place in the democratic popular revolution against imperialism, feudalism and comprador capitalism, is also included in the popular classes. However, the term nation includes all classes and strata, including the ruling classes. “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” All classes and strata that speak the same language, live in the same territory, and are in the same unity of economic life and psychological formation are included within the scope of the nation. Within these are classes and strata that are enemies of the revolution and counterrevolution, just as there are classes and strata in the ranks of the revolution and whose interests are served by the revolution. …

Today Kurdish workers, Kurdish poor and middle peasants, urban semi-proletariat and the urban petit bourgeoisie that will join the ranks of the national democratic revolution are all included in the concept of Kurdish people. Apart from these classes and strata, the other sections of the Kurdish bourgeoisie and Kurdish landlords are also included in the concept of Kurdish nation. Certain smart aleck well-read persons claim that landlords cannot be part of a nation. They even claim that, since there are landlords in the Kurdish region, the Kurds do not yet constitute a nation. This is a dreadful demagogy and sophistry. Don’t the landlords speak the same shared language? Don’t they live in the same territory? Are they not part of the same unity of economic life and psychological formation? …

In claiming that national oppression is only applied to the Kurdish people, the Safak Revisionists fall into one of these two errors: either the term Kurdish people is being used correctly and the entire Kurdish bourgeoisie and small landlords are not included in this, in which case the national oppression being implemented against the Kurdish bourgeoisie and small landlords is being obscured, thereby indirectly approving this oppression, leading to the line of Turkish nationalism or, the whole Kurdish bourgeoisie and small landlords are being included in the concept of the Kurdish people, in which case the class oppression suffered by the Kurdish people in addition to national oppression is being obscured, the national movement is being portrayed as the same thing as the class movement, and in this way the line of the Kurdish nationalists is being adopted.

Moreover, apart from the Kurdish people there are minority peoples that do not constitute nations and national oppression is applied to them in the form of prohibiting use of their languages, etc. The Safak Revisionists leave this point entirely aside.

[Source]

The Turkish communists started their people’s war in 1972, and many different communist parties have been taking part in it. It started with Kaypakkaya and the Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML, as it is abbreviated in Turkish), which he helped found; they began mobilizing the Turkish and Kurdish masses for the revolution. The people’s army led by TKP/ML is the Liberation Army of the Workers and Peasants of Turkey (TİKKO), founded with the party. The Turkish state captured Kaypakkaya in 1973, and its agents continually tortured him. Despite his young age, he protected the party by refusing to release any secrets. The party suffered many losses in its leadership from conflict, yet it continued waging people’s war against the fascist state. The people in the regions of their operations supported the revolution, especially the Kurdish people, who saw the cadres as their fighters and leaders. The party won many victories in Tunceli Province.

Unfortunately, starting in 1976, TKP/ML dealt with extreme factionalism and many splits, for communists faced confusion regarding the events in Turkey and across the world, including on the question of continuing revolution, on Enver Hoxha’s condemnation of Mao after his death, and more. The most significant of these splits was in 1987, when TKP/ML—Eastern Anatolia Regional Committee (TKP/ML-DABK) left the party. The faction became the Maoist Communist Party (“Maoist Komünist Partisi”) of Turkey and North Kurdistan (MKP) in 2003. This party and TKP/ML remain allied in the Turkish people’s war. MKP has two branches of its people’s army: the People’s Liberation Army (HKO) in rural areas and the People’s Partisan Forces (PHG) in urban regions. In 2015, TKP/ML faced yet another split, for liquidationism within the party tried and failed to push their right-opportunist line. The party explained what happened in On the Path of the First Congress (all emphasis is the authors’):

In 2015, with a systematic attack based on the right line, splittist activities within the party started to grow. This splittist activity has acted by trying to turn party law into a means of establishing the right line, taking over the leadership and making its political line dominant. It carried out his work by sabotaging the democratic mechanisms operating with the clamor of “the leadership does not represent the party”, “there is unlawfulness in the party” and, ultimately, by not accepting the decisions made with these mechanisms. Leaving the party without leadership, by defending the disorganization that recommends that each committee act as it knows, by defending the class compromising line in alliance policies and current politics, by obscuring the leadership role of the party in the class struggle, it almost entered an orientation by seeing the Communist qualities as an obstacle to development and massification. As a result of the struggle waged by the communists within the party by gathering around the party leadership against this orientation, this right-wing understanding first left the party ranks and then the war ranks with the same speed and established its own structure. On the one hand, the comprehensive attack of the Turkish state and the European imperialists, on the other hand, the attack of this rotten right-wing liquidation inside surrounded the party. The Party managed to hold its 1st Congress under all this wave of siege and attack. …

The state of our Party was divided into two sections, one being the period until 2015 and the latter being the period since 2015 up to this day. Our Party has been subjected to an extraordinary putschist-factionist attack and eventually a group that has proven itself to be party and war deserter has left the ranks of the Party. The necessity to approach the process in two distinct periods originates from this situation. Within this context an assessment has been done on the Right–liquidationist, Party and War Deserter band that became systemized in January 2017 and finalized its course in October 2017 and the assessment made in the 8th Broadened Meeting of the Party Central Committee has been approved by our Congress. In the following period this band has managed to commit a series of crimes as wearing away revolutionary values, attacking the party with the backing of the police and the mafia, being deserters in the field of war, stealing the weapons and ammunition of the party and handing them to the enemy. At this point this band took its place in the stage of history as having committed a series of practices that serve the counter-revolution, having weakened its revolutionary veins, existing at a symbolic level in the country, having lost its ties with the problems of the revolution in the country and essentially becoming a band that is based in the abroad. In addition to the approaches and assessments of the 8th Broadened Meeting of the CC, these designations have been made and approved in our Congress.

[Source]

Though the document above does not cover this, the rightist faction calls itself “TKP-ML”, formerly “TKP-ML ÖK” (“Organizing Committee”). This and the real TKP/ML are not the same, with the former working against Turkey’s people’s war. In another statement, TKP/ML explained (with our emphasis):

In the end, the factionists, which we have long described as a right-wing liquidation group, took the form of a separate “organization”. It publishes central statements under the name “Organizing Committee” (ÖK) and seems to have its own hierarchy. The separation was complete and final in all areas. Given this fact, the class character of this faction is the right wing of the urban petty bourgeoisie. This class character is essentially a consuming one. It has a structure which is isolated from production and the masses, which would like to be intellectual and arrogant, but at the same time which becomes lumpen. Its political line has liquidation-opportunist and reformist tendencies. Its organizational line is autonomous, random and anarcho-liberal. Its liquidation is essentially based on the erosion of the Party’s ideology and political leadership.

For this reason, from now on, our party will no longer call it a fraction [of the party] but a right-liquidatorial petty-bourgeois movement. The fact that our party ceases to define it as a faction is linked to its policy, which determines our view and attitude towards this group. Our party does not want to impose a ban on this group, nor does it consider it a group that could not be cooperated with. Our party sees it as an element and supporting subject of the class struggle, as one of the forces in the people. Here again we declare that the general political line, orientation and organizational concept of this group has nothing to do with our party TKP/ML.

[Source]

MKP was not immune to splits, either; no communist party can avoid line struggle. In the MKP’s case, the split was even more confusing than TKP/ML’s recent split, for the splitters refer to themselves as “Maoist Komünist Parti” rather than “Maoist Komünist Partisi” like the genuine MKP. The party summarized the situation in a statement released on June 17, 2021:

In late 2014, our party experienced an internal crisis due to the “3rd Congress” held in 2013, which was a coup and usurpation attempt against the party. This congress has been noted down in history as the most significant transformation and liquidation of the Kaypakkaya line. After extensive struggle against this “3rd Congress”, our party was unable to maintain unity with the faction who advocated for this congress. As a result, the MKP has been in an intensive recovery process since 2014 to remove the damage that this separation has caused. The party has completed the reorganization in 2020 and has recently made public with the 3rd Congress, not to be confused with the “3rd Congress” held in 2013 by the faction which separated from our party.

After the separation, our party continues to use the name “Maoist Komünist Partisi” while the faction uses the name “Maoist Komünist Parti”.

[Source]

The revisionist “MKP” denies the democratic characteristic of the ongoing revolution in Turkey; it also opposes the “monopoly of power by the leadership” of the communist party, using ultra-“leftist” notions of “dictatorship of the party or dictatorship of the masses”, not the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory of dictatorship of the masses led by their vanguard party. The “MKP” also opposes proletarian dictatorship in general, supporting multi-party “socialism” (an impossibility, as those of us who understand our theories of the vanguard party and the proletarian dictatorship would say) and other liquidationist errors [Source]. This “MKP” has since left the actual MKP, and we support the latter and not the former.

The Turkish people’s war is not the only war that Turkey has to face. Back in 1978, Kurdish people in Turkey and eventually neighboring countries started fighting for self-determination, and the communists critically supported (and still support) this struggle; remember that Kaypakkaya supported Kurdish self-determination. The main organization that has been leading this struggle is the “Kurdistan Workers’ Party” (PKK), formerly a Marxist-Leninist organization; after their leader, Abdullah Öcalan, was captured in 1999, and after his contact with “libertarian socialists”, he dropped Marxism-Leninism, making his party do so as well. Nowadays, the party supports “democratic confederalism”, the Kurdish adaptation of communalism. TKP/ML and MKP disagree with the ideology of the PKK, and rightly so; nonetheless, they support the overall Kurdish national liberation struggle. TKP/ML explained its stance in the previously-mentioned statement:

From the past to today, our Party has a common struggle perspective, strong relations and alliances with Kurdish national struggle by expressing our ideas explicitly and by keeping our line and by criticizing. We fought together in the same guerrilla units and lost our comrades in this fight, so it will be. However, this doesn’t mean that we won’t criticize the line of Kurdish national movement and their tendency. The relation of friendship is as a common struggle against the enemy, and as a political-ideological struggle with each other. This line which has been followed by our Party since the beginning faced liquidationism as a result of the faction.

[Source]

Along with the PKK, there are other Kurdish organizations in Turkey and the rest of Kurdistan, but most of these are under or allied with the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF), a coalition of various organizations that are compradors for American imperialism. The PKK works with the SDF against reactionaries, but it is considered a terrorist group by the US. We do not support the SDF for its collaboration with imperialism because this collaboration made the Kurdish people pretty heavily dependent on American support; when the US tried to withdraw from Syrian Kurdistan in 2019, the reactionary Turkish military attacked in hours. Rather, we support the anti-imperialist forces in Kurdistan, the forces that do meaningful work to liberate their nation.

TKP/ML and MKP are part of the International Freedom Battalion (IFB), a large anti-fascist front of many socialist, communist, and even anarchist parties and organizations from around the world that work together against Islamists and in defense of Kurdistan against various reactionary comprador states (Iraq, Iran, Syria, and mainly Turkey). This organization is allied with the SDF, but it does not have support from American imperialists because of the wide presence of revolutionary and progressive parties. MKP is also part of the Peoples’ United Revolutionary Movement (HDBH), a coalition of various Turkish organizations that all work against the Turkish state. TKP/ML criticized HDBH for various reasons, including its lack of communist leadership (with the dominant organization being the PKK), its focus on the revolution in all of Kurdistan rather than in the country of Turkey specifically, its promotion of “democratic autonomy” for the Kurdish nation (rather than the Marxist position of self-determination), and more; however, it is allied with HDBH, and it takes joint actions with them. In Turkey, the fascist state oppresses the Kurdish nation, as explained before. In addition, Turkey supports terrorists against the Kurdish struggle for national liberation. Turkey supports almost all Syrian rebels, even as other regional powers and US imperialists have officially stopped backing the majority of them; these rebels use genuinely terrorist tactics against the masses in their captured areas, including in Rojava. Turkey has even gone so far as to support ISIL in its expansionist schemes:

The occupier and murderous Turkish State’s Army has attacked Armenia with gangs camouflaged in Azerbaijan uniform. As if the attacks on Libya, Idlib, Rojava and Southern Kurdistan were not enough now Turkey attacks Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). … The Turkish state has once again revealed itself as the enemy of not only the Turkish-Kurdish people, but also the Greek-Armenian-Arab nations. … It was revealed that some of those killed and captured by Armenia were not Azerbaijani soldiers but members of the ISIS-SNA gang. The AKP-MHP dictatorship, which tries to hide its own crimes and lies through fake news about our battalion, cannot convince anyone with pride and conscience.

[Source]

On top of this, in Turkey itself, the state forces support terrorists against the Kurdish nation within Turkey’s borders. The Grey Wolves—Turkish fascists who fought alongside Azerbaijan against Armenia in the 1990s, Chechen separatists against Russia in their period of conflict, and other reactionaries—are considered terrorists by Kazakhstan and even some of the European imperialists, but they receive state support in their attacks against Kurds; they attacked Kurds in different protests, harassed bourgeois parties and murdered activists who supported the Kurds’ struggles, and more, yet the Turkish state goes out of its way to defend these reactionaries and actual terrorists. The hypocrisy would be amusing if it did not justify terrible reactionary violence.

TKP/ML and MKP both empower women, and this is important for a country whose state actively funds Jihadist groups, which want to preserve patriarchy and sexism in general. TKP/ML’s Dersim Regional Command paid respects to female soldiers that the Turkish fascist state murdered:

We are going through a difficult process. Both the all-out attacks of the enemy and the liquidator attacks increase this difficulty even more. However, we have the power to confront this challenge. We are not strangers to these losses, and we knew how to walk our path more confidently, binding up our wounds each time. Comrades Nubar and Özgür were among the most concrete examples of this. Their daring and assertion to assume the political and military leadership of our Guerrilla War after our five red carnations (five women martyrs on February 2, 2011) gives us strength. Just as they shoulder responsibility without hesitation after February 2, it is now up to us to undertake this task.

[Source]

CPI (Maoist) also pointed out the importance of female comrades in the TKP/ML and the entire revolutionary movement:

The role of women in the movement is to be upheld. There is a dynamic path for struggle with the oppressed gender in class and social struggle. There are many women’s movements that make such a struggle. In addition to the existing problems, the struggle shall develop and go forward. It decided that with the present understanding, there is a need to develop an alliance on the basis of united practice of the organizations and forces that make ‘civil rights’ struggle on this problem.

[Source]

The Turkish comrades of TKP/ML and MKP have some criticisms from foreign comrades, just like the Indian and Filipino comrades [Source]. TKP/ML does not recognize Gonzalo’s additions to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, for example. It sees Gonzalo’s theories as solely applicable to Peru, which is clearly not the case; all of these parties applied Marxism to their conditions, generating guiding thoughts for their specific revolutions, proving the universality of guiding thought. The TKP/ML is a militarized party, and the Turkish people’s organizations are built in a concentric fashion, proving the importance of militarizing the communist party and the concentric construction of the people’s war. The party wages people’s war, obviously, and this people’s war is unitary since the cadres use different tactics for the same overall strategy. Therefore, the party should technically uphold Gonzalo’s universal contributions. MKP has similar issues that are relatively minor; while it upholds Gonzalo’s contributions, it struggles to take many actions in the people’s war. (This is probably due to the split it had earlier, but we hope for its success.)

We fully support these parties as they fight to overthrow the rotten and reactionary Turkish state, as do all Maoist parties worldwide.