152. In the second half of the 1960s, Turkey witnessed militant class struggles accompanied by rapid urbanization and industrialization. These struggles, part of an international upsurge in the working class, included wildcat strikes, factory occupations, land occupations by poor peasants and students’ anti-war protests. The radicalization of the working class culminated in the massive resistance of June 15-16, 1970, in the industrial basin of Istanbul and Kocaeli, in which over 100,000 workers took part. The mass mobilization against a legal amendment targeting the DİSK trade union confederation, which had been founded in 1967 on the basis of rank-and-file struggles in opposition to the pro-government Türk-İş confederation, was to end with a call by the leader of DİSK himself to “go back home.”

153. Founded by trade unionists in 1961, the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP), an essentially reformist party, became an important center of attraction for radicalized workers, especially young people, during this period. Led by many political figures from the still outlawed Stalinist TKP, the TİP advocated a nationalist and parliamentarist program, so-called “Socialism with Turkish characteristics.” In contrast, the program of “national democratic revolution” put forward in the mid-1960s under the leadership of a Stalinist figure, Mihri Belli, whom the Pabloites would later praise as an “internationalist socialist,” would have a significant impact on the radicalized youth disillusioned with the parliamentarism of the TİP leadership and lead to a split in the party. This program, which was essentially based on the Stalinist “two-stage” theory of revolution, rejected the development of an independent revolutionary policy of the working class. According to this understanding, which laid the foundations of guerrillaism and the promotion of so-called left-wing coups in Turkey, the revolution against the “comprador bourgeoisie and feudal landlords” in Turkey, which could not be defined as capitalist, was to be led by a “national front” composed of the “national bourgeoisie,” officers, students and intellectuals who “preserved the revolutionary essence of Kemalism.” This new government would implement an essentially capitalist program of national development by subordinating the working class to the bourgeoisie. And it would lead the country to full independence, “which was also the goal of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.”

154. The confusion sown among youth by Stalinist leaders was accompanied by the glorification of guerrilla struggles in Latin America and wars of national liberation, such as in Vietnam. The fight waged by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International against Stalinism, Social Democracy and all forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism was almost entirely unknown in Turkey. The Stalinists’ lies about Trotsky and Trotskyism were reinforced by the policies of the Pabloite United Secretariat, known internationally as “Trotskyists”, which adapted themselves to Stalinism and petty bourgeois radicalism. Under these conditions, misguided youth leaders took the path of petty-bourgeois adventurism in the form of rural and urban guerrillaism, based essentially on Castroism and Maoism. This attempt in the early 1970s resulted in the massacre of many leftist youth by the state after the Turkish military memorandum in 1971.

155. The struggle of the Sri Lankan Trotskyists against the petty-bourgeois radicalism of the JVP (People’s Liberation Front) in the same period made clear important political lessons that should be studied in Turkey and around the world. The JVP, a nationalist organization hostile to the working class whose program was informed by Castroism and Maoism, was subjected to a detailed critique by Keerthi Balasuriya, leader of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI. In the preface to his book titled The Class Nature and Politics of the JVP, published in December 1970, Comrade Balasuriya explained:

Many elements, claiming to base themselves on the experiences of Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution, try to reduce the question of the revolution simply to one of carrying out, in one way or the other, a protracted “people’s war” or some other form of armed struggle. These attempts have nothing in common with Marxist positions on revolution. The question of revolution cannot even be posed without a genuinely objective evaluation of the inter-relationships between the classes and their dynamics ... The Marxist conception that emphasises that the working class cannot come to power by peaceful means has nothing in common with the stupid formula that victory is assured by simply getting armed. Anyone with the slightest respect for the experience of the revolutions where the working class, even though it had arms in hand, was beaten and crushed by the bourgeoisie, will not advocate such conceptions.^[1]

156. On March 12, the Turkish military leadership issued a memorandum to the president declaring that “the parliament and the government have plunged our country into anarchy, fratricidal strife, social and economic unrest with their continued attitudes, views and actions,” and threatening to seize power. In response, the Justice Party government led by Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel resigned. However, parliament was not dissolved, political parties were not banned, and the Constitution was not suspended. Instead, the military chiefs demanded a “neutral” government to which they would issue directives from behind the scenes. Thus, CHP deputy Nihat Erim resigned from his party and formed a government of technocrats. Other short-lived governments followed. This military intervention, which came amid a growing labor movement and political instability, retired or replaced many senior officers involved in the March 9 “nationalist-leftist junta” attempt, on which some Stalinists also relied.

157. Following the kidnapping and assassination of Israeli Consul General Ephraim Elrom on May 22, 1971, by the Turkish People’s Liberation Party-Front (THKP-C) led by Mahir Çayan, the Erim government launched a violent crackdown known as “Operation Sledgehammer.” Martial law was declared in 11 provinces; constitutional freedoms were suspended; all strikes, occupations and assemblies were banned and made subject to permission; thousands of leftist intellectuals and youth, including journalists, writers, trade unionists and academics, were imprisoned and tortured. In 1972-73, many leftist leaders, including the heads of the guerrilla movements such as Mahir Çayan, Deniz Gezmiş and İbrahim Kaypakkaya, were killed by the state.

158. The foundations of Pabloism in Turkey, which had long ago broken with Trotskyism, began to be laid in the late 1970s by attributing a revolutionary role to Stalinism and guerrillaism. The magazine Sürekli Devrim (Permanent Revolution), published in 1978 by the advocates of the United Secretariat, set itself the goal from the very beginning of “winning” the guerrilla Revolutionary Youth / Revolutionary Path over to “Trotskyism.” It was the largest movement of the period based on the petty bourgeoisie and youth. Turning to the Stalinist organizations, attributing to them a revolutionary role and rejecting the struggle for the construction of an independent revolutionary leadership of the working class, the Pabloites stated in their declaration, under the title “The Unity of the Revolutionary Left and the Revolutionary Marxist Attitude towards Centrism”:

In the process of the global breakdown of the Stalinist movement’s merely apparent unity, rather than examining Marxist scientific theory—severed from revisionism—in its universal dimensions, various centrist currents that began from existing circumstances and confined themselves to solving certain practical problems contributed, in different guises and with Stalinist, Maoist and spontaneous-populist accretions, to the emergence of a ‘revolutionary’ movement. … With the legitimization of revisionism, dangerous tendencies can also arise within the centrist current’s policy of alliances. It is precisely at this point that the Revolutionary Marxist movement [i.e. the Pabloite Sürekli Devrim] must make intense efforts to break centrism away from Stalinism and come to a more leftist line.^[2]