D to Turkey Coup

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Demirel addressing Justice Party election rally With crude government propaganda presenting Kurdish people as 'mountain Turks' while brute force deprives them of their language and culture, resistance has sharply increased.

On this more than anything else the bourgeoisie is united, which lines up both Demirel and Ecevit against 'divisionism' and the Kurds' just claim for secession and complete national autonomy.

Nationalism in its most reactionary and pernicious form is historically a consistent feature of fascism. Systematic harrassment of ethnic minorities flows naturally from its extreme chauvinism and bizarre ideas of racial purity and superiority.

For Turkey's fascist National Action Party, the Kurds fulfil the role which elsewhere has been the lot of blacks and Jews.

Complemented by the Moslem fanatics of the Islamic National Salvation Party, and with the connivance of the state, the fascists pursue a campaign of terror of breathtaking dimensions.

Whilst having an expanding group of deputies within Parliament (which it uses to force the pace of government attacks), the. NAP relies for its influence on open terrorism.

Backed by finance capital, it draws its support predominantly from the petty bourgeoisie and backward youth which, organised into Grey Wolves bands, have a bloody record of ruthless Assassinations Assassinations are daily events. Liberals and intellectuals university professors and state officials regarded as too progressive are regularly gunned down. But it is trade union militants and socialists who are the primary target, since fascism's goal is the physical liquidation of all workers' independent organisations.

The stepping up of this orientation through attempts to force workers into the corporate MISK federation was behind the Ismir confrontation. • Yet the reasons for fascism's rapid expansion, indicated in the literally thousands butchered by them during the Past few years a elections which brought them a projected vote of close on two million, are not to be found within the ranks of reaction alone.

: An examination of the policies and record of the workers' political leaders reveals organisational paralysis and pacifist prostration of criminal proportions. Central to this has been the role of the Turkish Communist Party (TKP) leadership and its accommodation and subordination to the bourgeois RPP.

Though itself the victim of proscription and extensive suppression, its links with the prestige of the Bolshevik revolution have ensured it considerable mass support, specifically within the left trade union federation DISK, which organises 40% of industrial workers.

But even in the face of countless numbers of their own members being wiped out, the TKP have fought bitterly against direct working class action against the fascist menace.

Beginning from the principle of maintaining links with an illüsory 'democratic' and progressive' section of the ruling class, they ruthlessiy oppose any measures which would alienate the 'liberal' bourgeosie around Ecevit. • • Applying the classic Menshevik idea of a two-stage' revolution-first democratic capitalism, then socialism -they cling to the legacy of the RPP's former anti-imperialism.

In doing so they ignore the nature of the present epoch and how the fifty-odd years since Turkey's foundation confirm to the hilt the inability of any native bourgeoisie anywhere to carry through the democratic revolution and assert their independence from imperialism.

In setting out and elaborating the Bolshevik programme of Permanent Revolution, Trotsky graphically illustrated the inability of the indigenous ruling class to carry through the tasks historically set for it.

On the contrary, the establishment of basic democratic rights in such backward countries becomes inseparably bound up with the struggle for socialist revolution and a workers' and peasants' government as a transitional step towards the proletarian dictatorsnip. da u-laine Disastrous in other words, at the base of, and flowing from, the TKP's disastrously wrong, Stalinist policy against fascism (in the same mould as the Peoples Unity and Popular Front practised by the Eurocommunists) lies a profoundly counter-revol: utionary method.

However much the hardline pro-Moscow TKP leadership may scoff at their 'soft' Eurocommunist counterparts in Western Europe and elsewhere, Tere in reality they share with them a common rejection of'the leading independent and decisive role of the working class.

The TKP's appeals to, and reliance on, the capitalist state to deal with the fascists is a similar rejection of Leninism.

Aside from the colonisation by the NAP of whole areas of the state machine (particularly government ministries, the police and army), for Marxists the state exists for one purpose alone-to represent the interests of the class that rules.

Rifts and divisions will undoubtedly emerge within it as the crisis deepens, but for the TKP to appeal for defence to "patrioțic' military officers is to court carastrupit.

Pinochet in Chile was at first Allende's pick of the generals because of his 'loyalty to the constitution'!

To achieve their state power the workers and poor peasants must smash the bourgeois state apparatus and replace it with its own. One cannot evolve into the other.

Conditions within Turkey today are directly pre-revolutionary. The struggle for democratic rights and against fascism cool be separated nonnat ha conneatad from tho destruction of the degenerate capitalist system itself.

The demand for a united front of workers' organisations and building of armed defence squads against the fascists challenges organisationally and politically all attempts to bind the revolutionary forces to any wing of the ruling class.

It forms part of a programme directed towards dual power along with the demands for wages linked to a workers' index of inflation, occupation and workers control of factories as steps towards their expropriation, land reform and cheap credit for the poor peasants to free them from the tyranny of landlordism-culminating in the building of soviets of workers, poor peasants and rank' and file soldiers.

The Republican Peoples Party is a member of the Second International of Social Democratic parties.

At first sight, it appears to have a lot in common with the British Labour Party. But its history is completely different from the history of any social democratic party. The RPP is not a bourgeois workers' party, as Lenin described the Labour Historically it has directly represented the interests of a section of the Turkish ruling class and only recently has it seen it best to pursue those interests by adopting the guise of a party of the organised labour movement..

The RPP originated as the party of the one-party state founded by Mustafa Kemal. As the only party in Parliament it stood for a form of corporatist government that shared many features with fascism.

It was strongly nationalist, though secular; it was in favour of a 'strong state' which intervened in every aspect of life, it severely restricted democratic rights and repressed any autonomous workers' movement.

It has been the rejection of its rule by sections of the bourgeoisie which has made the RPP try to shift its ground.

Both before and after World War II during attempts to implement a more convincing form of parliamentary democracy, the bourgeoisie swung behind parties that represented their interests under what were very changed conditions-that is they were in favour of less state control and greater freedom for capital.

In the crisis of the thirties this party (the Free Party) was shortlived because the bourgeoisie still sought the security given by the strong state policies of the RPP..

But in the post war economic boom; first Menderes Democratic Party and then Demirel's Justice Party won the support of increasingly large sections of the bourgeoisie and Turkey was ruled through a liberal democracy.

In the conditions of comparative freedom and economic expansion the organised labour move caw davidi moye is this movement, which the RPP had previously suppressed, and in whose development it had no part, that the RPP now aspires to lead.

The growing strength and militancy of the working class, together with the gathering economic crisis, provoked intervention from the military in 1971.

Equivocal

Demirel's Justice Party was equivocal towards military repression, and under its new 'left' leader Bulent Ecevit the RPP moved to fill the vacuum through the Parliamentary leadership of the opposition.

It dressed itself in the clothes of Social Democracy, with a programme in defence of workers' rights, the welfare state, etc., wrapped up in left, populist rhetoric.

Like the bourgeois Democratic Party in the USA, with a similar 'pro-labour' veneer, the RPP has never had organic links with the workers' movement.

Unlike Social Democratic parties which are the reformist parliamentary expression of the labour movement-built by the working class but with leaders who consciously serve the bourgeoisie, the RPP historically is the party of the Turkish state.

Though now covered in a cloak of liberalism' and 'democracy, today, as before, the KPP is an organisation bullt Iot and dedicated to preserving the bourgeois Turkish state. Aş such, not only has it no interest whatsoever in defending workers against capitalism, it is generically incapable of doing SO.

Illusions in its class nature and ..the maintenance of its links with the trade unions result from the influence of forces within the working class who fear the consequences of independent political action by the proletariat.

The experience of the masses will inevitably confirm the disastrous results of a continuation of that alliance in the struggles ahead.

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This is part of a WESTON *Argument (Penguin) secon! w by Tony for the concluding revi EOFFREY of' inn's book Socialism'