Marxist Left Wing in Turkey (Click Image for Full Size)

[1] Hrant Dink TKP-ML and Taner Akcam

Hrant Dink studied zoology and philosophy at Istanbul University(mid 70ies) where he became involved with Turkish leftist groups. He was jailed several times for his participation in this movement. When Dink was active in Leftist circles (Turkish Communist Party- Marxist Leninist) he changed his name to Firat so that the Armenian community can be spared from bad publicity. Radical left had many Armenian members during those years like Garbis Altınoğlu (1). When Turkish security forces launched an action against a training camp of the opposition group TIKKO (“Worker and Peasant

Liberation Army of Turkey”) in Gatera near Izmit on 24 January 1988, a 24 year-old Armenian, Manvel Demir,was heavily injured, and later died in the hospital.

The congress of DEV-GENÇ on October 18, 1970, was a milestone for the Turkish revolutionary movement in the aftermath the ideological discussion within the left deepened and became more clearly, splits and unifications occurred, and the armed forces of the revolution emerged: THKP-C, THKO and - later - the TKP-ML.

The TKP-ML connection of Dink (Firat) leads us to another name. Taner Akcam.

Taner Akcam (*) was born in Kars--a province where there is a sizeable number of Turkified Armenian families--and he is the son of the leftist writer Dursun Akcam. Taner Akcam became involved in radical leftist activities while he was still a lycee student. His radicalism intensified while he studied at the Middle East Technical University in the early 1970s. Akcam moved from student activism into political terrorism by joining the THKP-C (Turkiye Halk Kurtulus Partisi-Cephesi-Turkish People's Liberation Party-Front) in 1972--a terrorist organization that was implicated in the assassinations and killings of numerous far-right militants, Turkish security officials, and American and NATO military personnel. In the mid-1970s, Akcam became a leading member of DEV-YOL (Devrimci Yol-Revolutionary Path) and the editor of its periodical Devrimci Genclik Dergisi (Revolutionary Youth Magazine). It might be recalled that DEV-YOL was one of the two principal leftist terrorist organizations (the other being DEV-SOL) that played a major role in the bloody escalation of political violence in Turkey during the 1970s. In the bizarre ideological divisions among the leftist groups that proliferated on the Turkish political scene at the time, DEV-YOL was known as following a "pro-Soviet" line in terms of its international loyalties. DEV-YOL's bloody terrorist activities, which claimed hundreds of fatalities and a large number of serious injuries, included assassinations, armed attacks, bombings, and bank robberies. The group also achieved notoriety when it set up a so-called "liberated zone" in the town of Fatsa on the Black Sea coast where DEV-YOL militants established their control for several months before being routed by the security forces.

(10) TKİH ve TKP/ML Hareketi Birlik Kongresi Belgeleri by Garbis Altınoğlu
Varyos Yayınları; Modern Türkiye Tarihi 1961-1971;
İstanbul , 1994, 15.5 x 23.5 cm., 238 sayfa, Türkçe, Karton kapak.

(*) A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
by Taner Akcam Metropolitan Books
November 2006, 484 pages, $30.00

[2] Gezmis, Deniz (1947-1972) The founder of the People Liberation Army of Turkey (THKO).

As a teenager he entered the Faculty of Law of the University Istanbul. He joined Workers Party of Turkey (TIP) in 1965. He led a lot of student actions against US imperialism. He advocated the thesis "National Democratic Revolution". He founded in 1968 the Revolutionary Students Union. In 1969 he went to Palestine for three months, to join guerilla camps of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1970 THKO, the guerilla organization, was founded. At 1971 Gezmis and his comrades kidnapped four USA soldiers. But they were arrested. The three leaders of THKO Deniz Gezmis, Hüseyin Inan and Yusuf Aslan were executed on 6 May 1972.

[3] Devrimci Yol:

Devrimci Yol (Turkish for "Revolutionary Path", shortly DEV-YOL) was a Turkish political movement (as opposed to a tightly structured organization) with many supporters in trade unions and other professional institutions. Its ideology was based on Marxism-Leninism but rejected both the Soviet and the Chinese model in favor of a more native Turkish model, although it was influenced by the latter.^[Devrimci Yol entered the political scene in Turkey on 1 May 1977 with its manifesto called bildirge. Its roots can be seen in a movement that called itself Devrimci Gençlik ("Revolutionary Youth", short DEV-GENÇ), and it followed the thesis of Mahir Çayan.

In a report on the central trial against Devrimci Yol in Ankara Amnesty International wrote in June 1988:

Dev-Yol had no formal membership and gathered its supporters among people sharing the views expressed in a journal under the same name. Until the military coup in September 1980 this journal was legal like many other political publications."

In April 1997, the Swiss Refugee Support Organization (in German Schweizerische Flüchtlingshilfe, SFH) published a report simply called "Türkei - Turquie". The report included detailed information on many legal and illegal Turkish and Kurdish organization. On Devrimci Yol, it stated inter alia:

"The organization was led by a collective. In the indictments against Dev-Yol the members of the central committee were named as: Oğuzhan Müftüoğlu, Nasuh Mitap, Ali Başpınar, Mehmet Ali Yılmaz, Akın Dirik, Melih Pekdemir, Ali Alfatlı, and Taner Akçam. Devrimci Yol quickly developed to a mass movement and had tens of thousands followers in a short time. Before the military coup its publication had a circulation of 115,000."

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NOTES

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The MLKP was founded at a Unity Congress held in September 1994, through the fusion of the TKP/M-L Hareketi and the TKIH. At the time it had chosen to call itself MLKP-K. This essay shall attempt to summarize the history of the MLKP and its constituents and evaluate the present position of this organization.

Although it was the product of the fusion of two main groups, it was the TKP/M-L Hareketi, which formed the ideological backbone of the MLKP.

One should get to know the TKP/M-L Hareketi more closely to be able to understand the present plight of the MLKP. That’s the reason why, among the two main constituents of the MLKP, priority has been assigned to the treatment of the TKP/M-L Hareketi.

The predecessor of the TKP/M-L Hareketi was the TKP/M-L, founded in 1972 by Ibrahim Kaypakkaya. The TKP/M-L emerged as a left Maoist group in the tradition of the Communist Party of India/Marxist-Leninist, led by Charu Mazumdar. Even at the time, Turkey was a relatively developed dependent capitalist country which boasted of a militant and sizable working class. With the very significant exception of Kurdistan, peasantry in Turkey did not have a strong revolutionary tradition. The history of Turkish republic had not witnessed to any important radical and revolutionary mass peasant movement, apart from the national uprisings of Kurdish peasants. Dogmatically defending the basic tenets of Maoism, I. Kaypakkaya’s TKP/M-L was for a strategy of a protracted people’s war and encircling of the cities from the countryside. During the 1972–73 period, the TKP/M-L was defeated in its rural guerilla campaign, along with two other radical revolutionary groups, the THKO and the THKP-C, who chose to focus their work in the cities, at least during the first phase of the struggle.

The THKP-C was the strongest of the major revolutionary groups of the 1971–1973 period; it was a revolutionary guerilla organization, close to a Castro-Guevara line. The THKO, the third main revolutionary group of 1971–1973 period, was also close to a Castro-Guevara line and by far the least advanced of the three theoretically. Although the THKP-C and the THKO too paid homage to Mao Tse-tung as a great revolutionary, made references to him and adopted a strategy taking the countryside as the main battleground between revolution and reaction, they were in practice urban-oriented groups. All three of these main groups owed their origin to the mass revolutionary movement of the youth in the second half of the 1960’s. They all opposed Soviet modern revisionism in differing degrees (much stronger and more systematically in the case of the TKP/M-L) and mistakenly identified this revisionism with the work in the cities and among workers. According to these three main groups, the Party would be built in and through armed struggle; in fact the real test of revolutionary militancy and rejection of revisionism was seen to reside in:

a) Considering armed struggle as the main form of struggle all along;

b) peasantry as the basic force of the revolution; and

c) the countryside as the main field of work.

After their defeat at the hands of the military junta that came to power in March 1971, the remaining cadres of these organization began to reorganize, especially following a general amnesty that led to the release of thousands of political prisoners in 1974. This reorganization went hand in hand with a critical evaluation of the experience of the 1971–1973 period and also with various splits in the ranks of these three main organizations. The root of almost all the various radical revolutionary groups of the 1980’s, 1990’s and the present day, can be traced back to the TKP/M-L, the THKO and the THKP-C.

The TKIH, one of the main constituents of the MLKP, had split away from the majority of the THKP-C in 1974 and begun to call itself the THKP-C/M-L. This split developed over the criticism of the “leftist” mass line of the THKP-C. From 1975 on the THKP-C/M-L began to oppose Soviet modern revisionism and embraced Maoism. In 1977 the group experienced a division; most of the leaders and part of the cadres fell under the influence of the revisionist theory of “Three Worlds” and left the organization to join the TIIKP1. In 1979 the THKP-C/M-L rejected Maoism and stood firmly by the PLA (i.e. The Party of Labor of Albania). During the 1977–1980 period, the THKP-C was a militant revolutionary-democratic group, bearing the symptoms of “left” infantile disorders, such as attempts at forming small revolutionary unions and calls for the boycott of elections. The urban-oriented group focused its attention on the work among workers, youth and toilers in shantytowns.

The TDKP, which was called the THKO at the time, came into being as a result of a split with the pro-Soviet revisionist minority of the THKO, called Miicadelede Birlik (’Unity in Struggle’) in 1974. Numerically much stronger than the THKP-C/M-L, it followed a similar ideological evolution. This group officially rejected the theory of “Three Worlds" in 1977 and held a conference in 1978, where it adopted the namethe TDKP-IO. Despite its numerical strength, the TDKP has been one of the most inert groups in the struggle against fascism; this group has also been notorious in concealing its defects under the cover of revolutionary phraseology and noisy advertisement of its supposed virtues and superiority. Mainly based among urban youth, the TDKP-IO too was for the formation of small revolutionary labor unions and boycotting elections. Not content with rejecting all forms of collaboration with other revolutionary groups, this most conceited and sectarian group in Turkish revolutionary movement was also renowned for heaping abuse on them. A case in point is the aggressive attitude of theTDKP towards the THKP-C/M-L. Three years after it had shed its right Maoist leaders, the THKP-C/M-L was described and evaluated by theTDKP at its First Congress in 1980 in these words:

“The leaders of this group took refuge in TIIKP together with as many people as they could take with them. As to the remnants, they formed a small anti-Party group progressively acquiring provocative traits.” (TDKP Birinci (Kurulus) Kongresi Beigeleri, p. 66)

The year 1979 and 1980 also witnessed a series of attacks of the TDKP-IO on the TIKB, which had split away from the THKO/TDKP-IO in 1978. The latter dubbed the TIKB as a “counter-revolutionary fraction” and “fascist” group and incited its militants to use violence against it. These attacks, which prompted the counter-attacks of the TIKB, left several militants from both sides killed and wounded. The TDKP-IO held its first and last congress in February 1980, where it adopted a semi-Maoist and populist programme and changed its name into the TDKP. In this programme, Turkey was portrayed as a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country, where agrarian revolution of the peasantry was said to be the main content of revolution. According to this programme, the national bourgeoisie had a stake in the democratic revolution. Therefore, revolutionary proletariat had to try to win over the national bourgeoisie, the interests of which were in conflict with those of “imperialism, feudal landlords and comprador bourgeoisie”!

In 1977, the TIKB, the nucleus of which had joined the THKO at the end of 1975, split away from the organization, criticizing its rightist mass line and the theory of “Three Worlds”. In fact the TIKB was the first, among the “pro-Albanian” groups in rejecting the theory of “Three Worlds” and Maoism. More significantly, at its foundation meeting, called “Advanced Militants Meeting” in 1979, the TIKB had been the first group, who adopted a Marxist-Leninist program essentially cleansed from Maoism. A comparatively small group, which took a definite and unequivocal stand against all brands of revisionism, the TIKB also shared the sectarianism and narcissism of the THKO/TDKP-IO to a certain extent, plus some of the “left” infantile disorders of the THKP-C/M-L.

The TKP/M-L, which along with other revolutionary groups, was able to resume its political work in 1974, experienced a division in 1976 over a discussion about the socioeconomic character of Turkey. The pure and dogmatic Maoists, in accordance with the thesis of Mao Tse-tung, claimed Turkey was a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. The other wing, calling itself the TKP/M-L Hareketi, recognized the dependent capitalist character of Turkey. However, despite this progress toward an essentially correct understanding of the mechanics of socio-economic transformation of feudalism into capitalism, this group preserved its adherence to Maoism until 1980. Accordingly, it continued to concentrate its attention, forces and work in the countryside and among the peasantry.

In contrast to all three of the TKIH, the TDKP and the TIKB; the TKP/M-L Hareketi had mainly been a rural-based organization, acquiring most of its cadres from among the population of the countryside. This structural trait of the organization may be taken as an additional reason for its persistence on its Maoist fallacies. During this period, the TKP/M-L Hareketi also distanced itself from the “left” opportunist mass line and strategy of “people’s war”, without openly renouncing their Maoist roots. In practice, this contributed to the strengthening of the rightist mood and habits, especially since cities had been and were the main centers of political conflict in Turkey. The TKP/M-L Hareketi was formed mainly in the countryside and away from these centers, where a fierce struggle between a “civilian” fascist movement, supported by the state and a big, but divided and multi-headed revolutionary movement was raging.

During this period, the conciliatory and centrist habits of the TKP/M-L Hareketi leadership, which prevented and would prevent it from taking a firm stand on most issues, were also taking shape. That was the reason why, the modest and half-hearted move away from Maoism, had not led to the recognition of the priority of the cities and the historical role of the working class in a capitalist country, such as Turkey. The TKP/M-L Hareketi would preserve its rural orientation and reaffirm it in its First Conference held in April 1979, though the importance of work in the cities and among workers was underlined more and more. Remnants of Maoist ideology and mentality lingered on much longer, despite the official acceptance of the approach of PLA and the rejection of Maoism in 1979–1980.

The TKP/M-L (YIO) was a far smaller group that split away from the TKP/M-L Hareketi in 1978. Its founders argued that the TKP/M-L Hareketi followed a rightist mass line and played down the importance of armed action.

June 02, 2021

A Glossary of Turkish Marxist Factions

[1] Hrant Dink TKP-ML and Taner Akcam

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