Enternasyonalist Komunist Sol ⁽¹⁾ is a group of Turkish Left Communists who have been in existence since 2005. The IBRP has had discussions with them in the past and published some of their material including an exchange of correspondence on imperialism. ⁽²⁾ The EKS have recently published two pamphlets in English, the first giving an historical account of the formation and subsequent defeat of the left wing of the Turkish Communist Party, and the second a collection of translations from documents they have published in the last three years in their Turkish magazine Gece Notlari (Nightnotes). ⁽³⁾ The articles have also been published under the imprimatur of the International Communist Current (ICC) and contain the ICC’s basic positions, addresses and internet details. Although the EKS’s relationship with the ICC is not made clear (since they seem to have edited these English collections themselves), they appear as the main political influence on the EKS.

The Left Wing of the Turkish Communist Party

The historical pamphlet is the more interesting of the two. It deals with the formation, rise to ascendancy and subsequent destruction of the left faction of the Turkish Communist Party (TKP). To anyone familiar with the history of the period between 1920-27 the pamphlet will make dismal, yet familiar, reading. The events have a familiar ring because they echo the treatment meted out to other sections of the communist left in this period by the Communist International (Comintern.) The parallel to the events which broke and dispersed the Italian Left Communists is particularly striking. The history tells a story of militant communist work being undermined by the Comintern because the interests of the Turkish proletariat did not fit in with the foreign policy needs of the Russian state. The general policy of the Comintern that communists should subordinate themselves to the nationalists in countries such as Turkey proved disastrous. After the TKP decided to implement this injunction at its 1921 congress, the leading communists, who returned to Turkey, were promptly murdered by the Kemalist ⁽⁴⁾ police, and other militants were imprisoned for long periods. At this time, Russia had allied itself with the Kemalist bourgeoisie in its 1919-23 war with Greece and was supplying them with arms and money. It did not therefore want the Kemalist government weakened. However, the left wing of the Party survived and strengthened itself in the class struggles of 1922-4 and actually gained control of the Party in 1922. This, in practice, led to the repudiation of the Comintern’s injunction to work with the Kemalist nationalists. Instead, they began a campaign of vigorous internationalist agitation. The second blow from the Comintern, however, came in 1924 with the bolshevisation of the party. As in Italy in the same year, the left were removed their leading positions and forced into opposition. In their place a right wing leadership, which supported the policy of working with the Kemalist government for the good of the “nation” was installed. The opposition of the left was gradually dispersed and its leaders and militants forced into exile. Many fled to Russia only to be sent to labour camps where they died or were murdered in one way or another. These included the most famous leader of the left faction, Salih Hacioglu. Unlike the Italian Left Communist current the Turkish Left Communists entirely disappeared.

The pamphlet attempts to deal with the theoretical reasons for these events in a brief section at the beginning. It correctly points to the contradictory and reactionary nature of Lenin’s position on the national question, specifically his insistence that “communist parties must assist bourgeois democratic liberation movements.” It points out how Turkish communists had to face the contradictions of this position in practice, which led to their massacre. The pamphlet correctly points out that this was a step on the road to the massacre of the workers of Shanghai by the Chinese nationalists of the Kuomintang in 1927. It identifies the weakness of Lenin’s position as being the idea that capitalism was made up as a sum of nation states rather than a global system, and his conclusion that sections of the bourgeoisie could be allies of the proletarian revolution. This is contrasted with Rosa Luxemburg’s position that capitalism was a global system and the proletariat could no longer give any support to any section of the bourgeoisie. This we entirely agree with. The roots of the Intentional Bureau for the Revolutionary Party go back to 1943. when Onorato Damen and others, established the first clandestine publication of Prometeo (which is still today the theoretical organ of our Italian comrades). From the beginning Damen insisted that Luxemburg was right against Lenin on the national question. The EKS have, however, also adopted Luxemburg’s economic positions and find an economic reason in her political conclusion in capitalism’s supposed inability to find new markets after 1914. This they present as the barrier to the development of the productive forces. The massive accumulation and expansion of the forces of production from this date shows that this is so clearly incorrect that it is not worth dwelling on. The comrades also do not seem to know that Luxemburg established her view about imperialism in the 1890s when she still accepted orthodox Marxist explanations of the origin of crises. She did not write her The Accumulation of Capital until 1912-13. We refer readers both to our article The Accumulation of Contradictions originally written in 19765 and to the report of our meeting on the financial crisis in this issue where a discussion on this issue is recorded.

The events described in this pamphlet are all controlled by what was happening in Russia and always lead back to this question of how the Comintern could have acted so clearly against the interests of the Turkish workers. The pamphlet does not satisfactorily answer this question but implies mistaken policies, deriving from the theses put forward by Lenin, are the explanation. Yet policies which favour the Turkish bourgeoisie as against the Turkish proletariat are bourgeois policies and the question of how they came to be adopted must be answered. What is brushed over in the theoretical section of the pamphlet is that the failure of the Russian revolution, through its international isolation, led to a situation where the Bolshevik party were engaged in building a form of capitalism in Russia. The capitalist needs of Russia were necessarily translated into Comintern policy. The theoretical justifications of Comintern policy were feeble in the extreme and changed from one congress to the next. However, the point which needs to be emphasised is that, once the Bolsheviks had committed themselves to building capitalism in Russia the actions which followed necessarily reflected this. The Comintern became an arm of the foreign policy of Russian state capitalism. The key issue is the abolition of capitalist relations of production and once the Russian revolution proved unable to do this then strengthening of capitalist productive relations was the consequence. The degeneration of the Comintern and the increasingly reactionary policies it adopted were derived from this.

Nationalist Movements Today

The EKS is, however, quite correct to concentrate on the national question as a key issue. The Middle East is today beset with nationalist struggles all of which present themselves as anti-imperialist and demand the support of workers in the same way as the communists of the 20s were urged to support the Kemalist bourgeoisie.

The second pamphlet contains recent leaflets and texts published by the EKS which denounce these movements and advocate the international unity of the working class against the bourgeoisie in the same terms as communists of the 1920s were doing. In a country which is as viciously nationalist as Turkey, this demands some courage. In their introduction the comrades tell us that there has “been a return to combativity of the working class” in Turkey, but it is not yet clear to us how far this revived struggle raises class issues against the prevailing nationalist tide. These articles make a major contribution to the work of internationalists, and is to be saluted all the more, in that the comrades have had to work in a second language. This can be seen in some of the minor errors (such as the Roman historian Tacitus becomes a Greek and Luxemburg’s Junius pamphlet becomes the Roman god Janus). These however only underline the amount of effort the comrades have made to carry out to make their contribution to a widening understanding of what is happening in Turkey. We welcome these publications and recommend them to our readers.

(1) The titles are Left Wing of the Turkish Communist Party and Internationalist Communist Left in Turkey (2005 - 2008). Both pamphlets cost £4/€5/$7. EKS can be contacted at: [solkomunist@yahoo.com].

(2) See Revolutionary Perspectives 41

(3) They can also be found on the EKS English website at eks.internationalist-forum.org .

(4) Kemalist refers to the nationalist movement founded by Kemal Ataturk which aimed to convert Turkey into a modern secular republic in the place of the Ottoman dictatorship which had collapsed with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The episode is a famous one as these 15 Turkish Communist had been at the Comintern’s Baku Conference of the Toilers of the East where the theses on cooperation with the “progressive bourgeoisie” was reiterated. Their deaths confirmed that in the epoch of imperialism there is no such beast as a “progressive” bourgeoisie.

(5) Now to be found on our website at leftcom.org .