Leninist Workers (Türkiye)
We have come to this day from long, very long roads. We came through great struggles, through difficult battles. We were forged in the hellish wars spanning more than two centuries. As those who create life and the world with our labor, we have come to govern that world, to tear down what is given and rebuild it anew!
Capital is a social relation. It is a relation based on the transformation of labor-power into a commodity, grounded in the exploitation of surplus value. It filters through all the differences of national, cultural, and historical texture and shapes society and the world as a common essence that cuts across all differences in form. Capitalism is a system based on the irreconcilable antagonism between labor and capital. The battlefield is the entire earth. In different geographies, in different cultures, we shared a common fate. Forms changed, legal expressions changed, discourses changed, but the essence itself never changed.
Today, here, we stand as the voice of workers and producers from the ancient lands of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia—from Turkey, the country of bridges and crossroads. Our story is just like the story of Latin American workers, the poorest sections of Asia, the workers of Eastern Europe… Our stories are shared. A common story shaped in the common laboratories of capital’s savage globalization offensive. The story of how imperialist finance capital and comprador monopolism turns a country into a paradise of cheap labor, or rather a complete hell of labor. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is not something distant, merely issuing orders from afar. It is a phenomenon inherent to, internalized within, dependent countries. Accordingly, the stick hanging over our heads, the savage exploitation in our factories and “free trade zones,” the “multinational corporations” plundering our lands and mines, the structure directing the ships leaving our ports, the domination established over every financial transaction, the bureaucrats each turned into mere errand boys for giant monopolies, and even the managers seated in ministerial or prime ministerial chairs with a kind of “governor-general” air… In a word, imperialism is a system we feel in our very bones. We are not even counting the fact that the military structure is a direct extension of imperialism!
Comrades, the imperialism we face today is not a giant at the peak of its power; it is a bandit living through its historical death agony, rotting, entering an inevitable process of collapse. Yet this collapse does not diminish its aggression—on the contrary, it makes it even more savage. Imperialist finance capital, in order to prevent this historical collapse it has fallen into and to ease its crisis, is not content merely with economically exploiting dependent countries; it subjects them to a policy of full annexation—politically, militarily, and economically. The liquidation of our lands, our laws, our claims to sovereignty in favor of imperialist monopolies, and the transformation of our geography into a front for regional wars, are the result of this strategy of full annexation. The comprador monopoly bourgeoisie is the willing collaborator and executor of this annexation policy.
In short, there is no abstract imperialist hegemony separate from capitalism in our countries.
There is no anti-imperialist banner to be raised without being against capitalism. Especially here, in Turkey, while rulers foam at the mouth ranting and raving against imperialist-Zionist aggression, to lose sight of the connection between anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism is an irreparable error. It is to leave workers and toilers blindfolded, without a compass, amid these wheels of exploitation and this chaos.
This wheel of exploitation is so hypocritical that the dominant classes’ chauvinist discourse, their false anti-imperialist rhetoric, and the artificial bravado they adopt on the international stage completely evaporates when it comes to customs gates and port quays. Even in wartime, when peoples are being bombed and geographies set ablaze, ships leaving Turkey’s ports have continued carrying the logistical needs of imperialism and its regional military outposts—their cement, iron, military clothing and equipment, and water. Yes, we are speaking of the Turkish state and Turkish monopoly capitalism sending shiploads of products to Zionist Israel while the genocide in Gaza continues in all its savagery. We are speaking of all the materials needed by the Zionist army—underwear, drinking water, military equipment, even ingredients for making explosives—being supplied via Turkey! The companies and little ships of those who shed crocodile tears in public squares are breaking profit records at the ports. Because for capital there is no religion, faith, homeland, or nation; for capital there is only an uninterrupted flow of profit and the realization of surplus value. The imperialist system stands on the strength of this hypocritical collaboration. This example alone is enough to show that the struggle against imperialism is an internationalist duty.
Imperialist banditry and war anywhere in the world must be met by the common, united, international struggle of workers the world over. From port workers to transport sector workers, from food producers to banking and financial system workers, from workers in industrial production to white-collar workers—only the united action of all workers can defeat the war and aggression maneuvers of imperialist bandits. Genuine international solidarity, genuine brotherhood of peoples, can only be created through such militant, direct action.
Comrades, the Turkish working class today is under severe siege beneath the structural crisis of global capitalism. The crises of imperialist countries are being transferred to dependent countries like ours in the form of more poverty, more precarity, plunder of nature, and deeper political repression. We are under the tyranny of a despotic regime in which union rights are seized and strikes are banned with a single decree under the pretext of “national security” or “economic stability.” Workers are leaving not only their labor but their lives in factories, shipyards, construction sites, and underground mines. Turkey ranks among the very top in the world for workplace manslaughter. This is not an accident—it is a conscious political-economic choice! The only way to guarantee “competitiveness” and “low costs” to global monopolies in the imperialist market is to reduce occupational health and safety costs to zero, to turn the worker into a cheap appendage of the machine.
On the other hand, the global capitalist order seeks to divide labor through policies of hostility toward migrant workers, aiming to prevent and weaken the united struggle of workers. Millions of migrants displaced by imperialist wars, occupations, and economic devastation are being made to work in Turkey by capital without security, without insurance, and at slave wages. International and domestic capital exploits this precarious migrant labor to the hilt as a threat against the native working class, as a lever to drive wages down across the board. Moreover, the rulers manage the social anger this situation creates by stoking racism and chauvinism.
We anti-imperialist workers state very clearly: Pitting a Syrian, Afghan, or African worker against a Turkish or Kurdish worker is capital’s oldest divide-and-rule tactic. Our enemy is not our class brothers and sisters trying to survive by crossing borders; it is the very imperialist barbarism that draws borders with weapons, bombs, drones, and financial packages! Those sweating at the same workbench may speak different languages and practice different religions, but the exploiting enemy is the same.
But Comrades—this dark picture does not drive us to despair. Because wherever there is exploitation, the seeds of struggle, revolt, and revolution also sprout. The Turkish working class possesses the historical legacy of those who never bowed, who never submitted. The class that in the past created the glorious June 15–16 workers’ resistance, that carried mine shafts all the way to the roads of Ankara, that occupied factories—today too it reproduces its will at every barricade. Despite all the betrayals of the official union bureaucracy, bourgeois yellow unionism, and capital-guided conciliatory lines; workers across Turkey are rising up with direct actions that shatter legal boundaries, with strikes, occupations, and acts of resistance. From textile workers to metal workers, from couriers to petrochemical workers, from miners to construction workers to white-collar workers, new and dynamic elements of the class are carrying the torch of resistance by building their own self-organization.
The workers who have put their bodies on the line at port gates to stop the bloody trade flowing from our ports into imperialism’s logistical machinery, who have shouted “End trade with Israel and imperialism!” in spite of police batons and detentions—they are the true honor of this country. They are our fresh blood, blending the internationalist character of class consciousness with practice.
Our struggle is not merely a struggle for economic rights—it is a total struggle against the imperialist-capitalist world system. Capital’s offensive is global; therefore our defense and our offensive must also be global. The monopoly that tears out the lungs of a mine worker at the other end of the world and the holding that leaves our miners buried under cave-ins are parts of the same international finance capital—they are arms of that vast octopus. If the raw materials of the drones raining death on Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, or any corner of the world, if the bombs falling on peoples, pass through our customs and are produced with our labor, then refusing to be complicit in this crime is our class duty.
We, the anti-imperialist elements of the Turkish working class, declare from this platform:
All commercial, military, and diplomatic agreements that feed and provide logistics to the imperialist war machine must be immediately cancelled. Ports must be closed to imperialist-Zionist bandits.
Labor has no race, no nationality, no refugee status. Against precarious, flexible, and slave-like forms of work, a common union and direct line of struggle that crosses borders must be woven.
Against bourgeois yellow unionism and nationalist and chauvinist manipulation, the class’s independent internationalist line must be built starting from the factories.
Capital wants to rule us by dividing us, by setting us against each other. They have their borders, passports, customs, and armies. But we too have a power that no border can imprison, that no gun barrel can stop: our power derived from production, and our class solidarity!
It is we who create life—we will not submit to the imperialist-capitalist aggression that seeks to destroy it! They will not be able to turn back the wheel of history. No matter how much forms change, no matter how great the lies on paper grow, the anger of workers who see the essence of exploitation will change the world.
We workers, though formally divided into countries, have no separate homelands. The whole earth is our homeland. We have long since lost our chains. Before us lies an entire world to be won!
