15.09.2004

One state, one party

Peter Manson reports from a meeting that celebrated the 84th anniversary of the foundation of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) - and argues that comrades living in Britain should engage with and intervene in British politics

Saturday September 11 saw a meeting to celebrate the 84th anniversary of the foundation of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) at London’s Marx Memorial Library.

The Party was declared illegal virtually from the first. Nevertheless the TKP has played an unmistakable role in the life of Turkey. In the late 1960s it began to assume a mass character. Today’s continuation comes from the left and a split with the ‘officials’ in the mid-1970s. The entire British committee - which published the paper Workers’ Voice - and all those in Germany and Turkey itself who dared express sympathy with it were unilaterally expelled by the now liquidated Moscow-backed leadership.

The British committee - the third largest TKP organisation - insisted that the revolutionary situation then gripping Turkey could be resolved in one of two ways - either positively by revolution or negatively by counterrevolution. The ‘officials’ sought a retreat from the dilemma by turning more and more towards reformism. However, in September 1980 the army staged its counterrevolutionary coup. Then began the criticism of weapons and the arrest of communists, revolutionary socialists and Kurdish left nationalists. Under these tragic circumstances the Workers’ Voice wing questioned not only the ‘official’ leadership but the entire strategy of the Soviet Union going back to Stalin’s time.

It was this wing of the TKP which helped inspire those who rebelled in the ‘official’ CPGB and conducted their relentless ideological battle through The Leninist - launched in November 1981. In 1991 these comrades reclaimed the name of the CPGB and now publish the Weekly Worker.
The TKP has gone through a deep crisis in recent times, its British organisation losing all community support as well as suffering splinters and splits. Thus the September 11 rally was seen as marking something of a relaunch, with a variety of communist parties and left groups invited to attend. However, although several sent messages of solidarity, only four attended the 40-strong event: the Communist Parties of Sudan and Bangladesh, the Democratic Socialist Party (Australia) and the CPGB.

It was, then, something of an eclectic mix, which in one sense reminded this writer of the kind of international gatherings organised by ‘official communism’ before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rashid El Sheikh from the CP of Sudan and Golam Mostafa from the CP of Bangladesh gave what passed for an analysis of the situation in their respective countries, ending their speeches with cries of “Long live the Communist Party of Turkey!”

Julian Coppens of the DSP, who wore a Respect T-shirt, turned out to be a temporary resident of Hackney. After informing comrades that it was DSP policy to forge links with Marxist groups of whatever type across the world, he too gave a run-down of the political situation in his country.

A TKP comrade read out an official statement which related the history of his party, beginning with the massacre of founding members returning from the famous Baku conference of 1920. The Communist International had also secured the attendance of Turkish nationalists at Baku, the comrade explained, and it was these very people who treacherously ordered the murder of the communists.

The tendency of Soviet communists to form alliances with other class forces at the expense of their own comrades was a theme of this part of his speech. After World War II the Soviet bureaucracy aided Turkish industry, even though the Turkish bourgeoisie allowed the placing of US nuclear weapons directed against the USSR on its soil. The Soviet press even greeted the army junta in 1980 as a “bulwark against terrorism”, said the comrade.

After a brief résumé of the current situation in Turkey, he concluded with the observation that in today’s circumstances it was wrong to “repeat old slogans and failed programmes”. Quite right. But he did not outline the new direction it was necessary to take.

Comrade Mark Fischer was introduced as someone who would “tell us about the situation in Britain”. This was ironic, given that many of the Turkish comrades in the room had lived in London longer than any of the CPGB comrades present. In fact comrade Fischer declined the invitation and spoke instead about the “profound political crisis” that had overtaken not only ‘official communism’, but the entire working class movement since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Comrade Fischer called for a “radical purging of false ideas from Marxism”. That had to include the recognition that from 1928 and the first five-year plan the USSR was no longer any kind of a workers’ state. We have to rid ourselves of all notions that the dictatorship of the proletariat can mean anything else other than the democratic rule of the working class and its allies.

Nor should proletarian internationalism preclude comradely criticism. On the contrary, he said, “communists need to be brutally honest with each other”. The criticism he was making of the TKP comrades who have lived in Britain for more than a generation is that they had not assimilated into British life in a fully revolutionary way. For example, they could have, and should have, joined the Socialist Alliance and then Respect alongside the CPGB. Exile politics is notoriously fractious, debilitating and ultimately sterile. Apart from exceptional circumstances and exceptional people - editors, members of a central committee, etc - migrants should be encouraged to take up the class war in their adopted country and thereby enrich its culture and political life.

The message was clear: communists must first and foremost unite to fight the ruling class in the country where they find themselves - that is an internationalist duty.