Workers-Toilers’ Rally in Istanbul: A United Front from Above is Not the Solution

On October 24, a “Worker-Toilers’ Rally” was held “For Our Labor and Freedom” in Kartal Square. This was not a demonstration organized by regime trade union confederations. In the conditions of Turkey, where the working class has been suppressed heavily, meeting in such a rally has undoubtedly been a source of hope and resistance for the workers who want to fight against the worsening economic conditions.

The speeches and demands expressed at the rally were on a class line. The problems of different segments of the working class were mentioned, calls were made for an organized struggle against capital, demands were expressed against subcontracting, harassment and mobbing at workplaces, and pressures against union organization. Workers talked about their experiences and struggles. Well, is this rally really a big step for the struggle of the working class in Turkey?

Unfortunately, we have to answer this question in the negative. The reason for this is related to how the rally was organized. Looking at the list of organizers of the rally, on the one hand, grassroots unions, some sections of DİSK (Confederation of Progressive Workers Unions), various workers’ organizations and struggling workers from small resistances, on the other, various parties and organizations of the radical bourgeois left, mostly Stalinists, stand out.

Such a form of organization means the imposition of a political united front, formed from above by political formations with different approaches, to the radical unionist base that attended the rally, no matter how much initiative the union base took in the process. Thus, a situation emerges where the rally couldn’t cover all of the grassroots unions outside not only the regime unions confederations but DİSK and KESK (Confederation of Public Employees Unions), which we can consider to be on the edge. Moreover, it should be stated that public workers did not take part in the rally to a large extent. The radical leftist political formations, which are among the organizers of the rally, as well as moderate leftist political formations that did not support the rally but ignored it and kept their supporters away are both to blame for this situation.

Of course, we cannot expect the parties and organizations of the radical or moderate bourgeois left to stop polishing themselves and trying to get their names heard for the sake of the interests of the working class. The most important thing is that the working class, especially those in grassroots unions, move towards establishing a trade-union united front from below, which will ensure unity against capital, instead of a political united front from above with unprincipled bourgeois diplomacy and political competition in the background; and which have always divided the class union movement: the trade union united front on which a political united front is imposed, inevitably remains confined within the limits the latter, separated from those parts of the class union movement which do not accept this subordination.

The International Communist Party fights, through its trade union fraction, i.e. with its comrades active in the trade union movement, to win the leadership of the economic organisations of the working class, but it differs from the whole variegated galaxy of trade union-political opportunism in that it refuses to pursue this objective through organisational shortcuts, whose aim is always to secure control of the bodies of workers’ economic struggle, not through an open struggle between the different trade union-political directions, in respect of the unity of action and organisation of the class trade union movement, but through forced and divisive actions, such as promoting trade union splits, or, in the case reported here, promoting unitary trade union actions under the protection of individual political parties or fronts.

We believe that it is the class interests of the proletariat before the name of this or that group is written on a list of organizers that is decisive on the long road to another world, emphasized by many workers speaking at the rally. «Communists have no interests apart from those of the entire proletariat». Our Party’s effort is to «point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality (…) in the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries», and to «always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole (…) in the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through» (“Communist Manifesto”).