184. The Republic of Turkey, which from its foundation recognized only non-Muslims as minorities, was totally incapable, under conditions of economic and cultural backwardness, of peacefully achieving “national unity” with the Kurdish people, who have a large population in the east and southeast of the country. The Turkish ruling elite subjected the Kurdish people to decades of violent repression, denying them basic democratic and cultural rights for fear that the imperialist powers would support the creation of an independent Kurdish state in Turkey in line with their ambitions in the Middle East. At the same time, this specter of “secession” would be invoked as a pretext to crush the working class and leftist movements.

As Kurdish rulers, whose authority had gone largely unquestioned in the Ottoman era, were forced to submit to the centralized authority being built in Ankara on the basis of a Turkish identity—above all through the institutions of the army and the judiciary—a series of uprisings and massacres took place in Kurdistan beginning in the mid-1920s. In a Kurdish geography dominated to a great extent by feudal relations, movements led by Kurdish sheikhs, tribal leaders and landlords at times fused religious and national demands. Following the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925, the government of President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk embraced an “Eastern Reform Plan,” which declared an indefinite martial law in Kurdish provinces, ordered the mass resettlement of Kurds to other regions, and banned the speaking of Kurdish. Prime Minister İsmet İnönü expressed the assimilation policy of the Kemalist regime on the Kurdish question in 1925 as follows:

Our duty is to make those within the Turkish homeland by all means Turkish. We will cut off the elements that will oppose the Turks and Turkism. The first quality we will seek in those who will serve the homeland is, above all, that the person is Turkish and a Turkist.^[1]

185. As the state repression of the Kurdish people continued, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) was founded in 1978 as part of a Maoist and Castroist left nationalist radicalization among the youth. Contrary to the claims of the Turkish Pabloites that it had “Marxist roots,” the PKK, founded as a Stalinist guerrilla organization, opposed the development of a united struggle of the Turkish and Kurdish working class and poor peasantry against the ruling class and the state. Combining the Stalinist program of “two-stage revolution” with Kurdish nationalism, the PKK declared the party’s aim in its “Founding Statement” as “liberating the people of Kurdistan from the imperialist and colonialist system, establishing a democratic people’s dictatorship in an independent and united Kurdistan and ultimately realizing a classless society.”^[2] While declaring itself “Marxist-Leninist,” in reality the organization fundamentally rejected Marxism, claiming that “Without solving national oppression, no problem of the country can be solved.”^[3] It was the unbridled state repression of the Kurdish people by the military regime that came to power in the NATO-backed coup d’état of September 12, 1980, and the governments that followed, that paved the way for the rise of the PKK and its emergence as an organization with a certain level of popular support.

186. The civil war that has raged for nearly 40 years since the PKK launched its armed struggle against the Turkish state in 1984 has claimed more than 40,000 lives. In the process, thousands of villages were burned, and masses of poor Kurdish peasants were forced to migrate westward, while mass protests, known as serhildans, took place in Kurdish provinces. The party leader, Abdullah Öcalan, operated under the patronage of the Soviet-backed Baathist regime in Syria from 1979 onwards. Despite its “leftist” and “anti-imperialist” rhetoric, the PKK had a bourgeois nationalist strategy of maneuvering between the great powers and regional states and ultimately reaching an agreement with Ankara. The 1991 Gulf War and the capitalist restorations in the Stalinist regimes led the PKK to take off the mask of “Marxism-Leninism” and abandon its demand for an independent state. With its military strategy failing, the PKK sought new allies, especially among the European imperialist powers, while the change in the party’s line went hand in hand with violent internal purges and the incessant glorification of Öcalan. Captured by the Turkish state in 1999 in the course of a CIA-backed operation that began with his expulsion from Syria after Ankara openly threatened war, Öcalan has since sought to develop cooperation with Ankara in the conditions of intense isolation in which he has been held.

187. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 marked a milestone in the PKK’s openly pro-imperialist evolution. Renamed Kongra-Gel in November 2003, the PKK declared in its new “Founding Statement” that it welcomed the US invasion, which would bring disaster to the peoples of the Middle East, including the Kurds. From 2009 onwards, a so-called “peace process” was developed between the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the PKK. This was in essence a “peace” process between the Turkish and Kurdish bourgeoisie under the auspices of the US and other imperialist powers. This so-called “peace” was developed as part of the imperialist war of plunder in the Middle East and was the product of forces hostile to the social aspirations of working people in the region and around the world. “Nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development,” Öcalan, inspired by Bookchin, wrote in his 2011 “Democratic Confederalism.”^[4] By 2013, he was openly admitting his role, saying, “I am the one who has kept the AKP in power for 10 years.” During the so-called “peace process,” enthusiastically supported by the legal Kurdish bourgeois nationalist Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) and various middle-class pseudo-left forces, Öcalan, in a letter read with the government’s permission at the Diyarbakır Newroz rally on March 21, 2013, emphasized the “Misak-ı Milli,” which the Turkish nationalists had declared as the target borders during the war of independence, including, among other places, the territories of Syria and Iraq, and “brotherhood under the banner of Islam.” The implications of this pro-imperialist postmodernist perspective, based on the interests of the Kurdish bourgeoisie and the affluent sections of middle class in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, had already become apparent with the de facto dismemberment of Iraq, leading to over 1 million deaths and a bloody sectarian civil war. But it was in Syria where the PKK would make its real breakthrough. The People’s Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which together with the PKK is part of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), became the main US proxy force during the imperialist-backed war for regime change that began in Syria in 2011. This was accompanied by de facto steps towards “self-rule” by Kurdish nationalists in Turkey. Speaking at the Democratic Society Congress (DTK) in December 2015, Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), said:

This resistance will be victorious. Everybody will respect the will of our people so that we don’t go through this pain again, dear brothers and sisters... The Kurds will be a political will in their own geography, in the very middle of the Middle East... Kurdistan will be a reality in the next century. Maybe the Kurds will have independent states, federal states, cantons and autonomous regions... Dictatorship or self-government? Under the rule of one man, his monarchical understanding, his oppressive male-dominated mentality? Or self-governments with human dignity, where we can all live freely and in brotherhood? We have made that decision...[5]

With the PKK-YPG gaining strength in northern Syria (Rojava) under the US-led “war against ISIS,” the possibility of an independent Kurdish state on Turkey’s southern border—and parallel developments inside the country—horrified Ankara. Gripped by the fear that the prospect of losing its own Kurdish region had come onto the agenda, the Turkish bourgeoisie, even as it dreamed of expanding its territory and influence, terminated the so-called “peace process” in 2015 with bloody clashes. As thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in the Kurdish provinces, and with the CHP’s support, many HDP leaders and thousands of members were unlawfully imprisoned.

188. In October 2023, Israel launched a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, followed by an invasion of Lebanon and the targeting of Iran. These events triggered the Turkish government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to restart negotiations with Abdullah Öcalan and the PKK in October 2024. Ankara did not oppose its U.S. imperialist ally, together with Israel, targeting Iran and its allies or shaping a “new Middle East” under full imperialist domination; rather, it positioned itself according to these developments. A regime change in Syria in December 2024 strengthened Israel’s position in the country. Israel declared the Kurds its “natural allies,” but this development also increased Turkey’s concerns that a US- and Israeli-backed Kurdish state could be established in northern Syria, an area that Turkey partly occupies. In February 2025, Öcalan, who favored reconciliation with Ankara, called on the PKK, of which he was still the leader, to lay down its arms and dissolve itself. Öcalan declared that the PKK had served its purpose and argued that the Kurdish issue could be resolved by “democratizing” the existing state. The PKK, accepting this call, convened a congress in early May, deciding to disarm and dissolve the party. In July, it began the disarmament process. President Erdoğan responded with a call for a “Turkish, Kurdish, Arab” alliance, which underscored the reactionary nature of the agreement between Ankara and the PKK. As the World Socialist Web Site explained on July 13, 2025:

… President Erdoğan confirmed the World Socialist Web Site’s analysis that the deepening imperialist war of redivision in the Middle East and the Turkish bourgeoisie’s expansionist ambitions are behind the deal with the PKK.

“Today, a new page in history has been opened. The doors to a great, strong Turkey have been thrown wide open,” said Erdoğan, outlining a bourgeois perspective based on a “Turkish-Kurdish-Arab alliance.” …

[T]he stated perspective aims to provide a political basis for the Turkish elite’s claim to the borders of the “National Oath” or “Mîsâk-ı Millî,” which the Turkish elite established in 1920 amid the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. These borders included northern Syria and Iraq, which are inhabited by Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmens.

The Turkish bourgeoisie is preparing to lay claim to Syria, Iraq, and the wider region by assuming the patronage of the Kurds and Arabs amid the imperialist war, which aims to ensure the total domination of the US, together with Israel, over the Middle East, and to redraw the maps.

Notably, the Persians, the dominant ethnic group in Iran which the US sees as an obstacle to its domination in the Middle East, are not included in Erdoğan’s “Muslim alliance” even though they are Muslims.^[6]

189. These experiences have vindicated the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution: The Turkish and Kurdish bourgeoisie, which is deeply tied to imperialism, is hostile to the democratic and social aspirations of the working people and is structurally incapable of solving the Kurdish question or establishing a democratic regime. This fundamental democratic problem can only be solved if the working class, backed by the oppressed masses of all nationalities, overthrows the imperialist-backed bourgeois regimes in the Middle East as part of the international socialist revolution, seizes power and establishes a truly democratic socialist federation.

190. The evolution of the PKK coincides with the route of numerous “national liberation” movements, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the African National Congress (ANC) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which waged armed struggle in the 1970s and 1980s and received political-logistical support from Stalinist regimes or states under Stalinist influence, then sought to integrate into the imperialist world order with the end of the USSR. The objective socio-economic basis for this worldwide political evolution of petty-bourgeois nationalist movements was the globalization of capitalist production, which ultimately undermined the viability of all national programs on which the Soviet Union and other Stalinist regimes and labor bureaucracies were based.

191. Regardless of the future of the agreement between Ankara and the PKK, the claim that it can truly bring about democratization and peace is a deception. The statement made by the Political Committee of the Workers League—the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States—following the 1988 agreement between Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and the US and Israel is highly relevant to the agreement between the PKK and Ankara. It declared:

Marxists implacably reject such accords and combat every pacifist illusion generated by the petty-bourgeois agencies of imperialism that “peace talks” can put an end to war and oppression. Marxists advance instead the program of class war to put an end to imperialism. Apologists for such deals only reveal their own uncritical acceptance of the whole imperialist world order. …

These events cannot be understood outside of a class analysis of the PLO. Its past adherence to the armed struggle and the heroism of its members notwithstanding, it is and always has been a bourgeois national movement. Its nationalism is that of the bourgeoisie which seeks to create the best possible conditions for the exploitation of its “own” working class. The failure of this bourgeoisie to establish its own state has in no way mitigated this drive.^[7]