The "Operation"

The Turkish army launched an operation to eradicate the PKK, or in other words launched the war again. We see that this bloody cycle is being repeated once again since Turkey went into Iraq for the first time in 1983.

The Agenda of the Turkish Bourgeoisie: War, Terror, Chaos and Barbarism

Once again, the upsetting news of more workers' children being sacrifices for the  brutal war in the South East came. The bourgeoisie and their media started screaming for more blood and chaos as always. As a result, people are now looking for "terrorists" in the street. But why did this happen?

Because the bourgeois state is in a state of crisis which hasn't been openly apparent for a long time. The economic reason at the bottom if this is the fact that the workers in Turkey have no more blood for the bourgeoisie to suck and if that isn't enough, as in the Turkish Airlines yesterday and more strongly in Türk Telekom and Novamed strikes today, they are beginning to resist. Increasing international debts and capital which is becoming more and more fictitious is getting more fragile on the "money market" as it is loaded on workers' backs. The bourgeoisie is pumping racism to continue this situation, thus Kurdish workers are exploited for a cheaper price and Turkish workers are left to miserably degenerate in the streets. The political consequence of this situation is the battle cries we always hear which aren't a solution to anything. The ideological walls of the bourgeois state are cracking every day. The more the outrage workers live in becomes questionable, the more capital will push society into degeneration, decay and decomposition and loses it's social validity which gave it it's meaning in the first place. The response of the bourgeois politicians to the latest massacre is the following.

For the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie, the issue is, as always, the "conspiracy" organized by the United States. According to them, if the Turkish Armed Forces invade Iraq, "terror will be eradicated". In reality, only three years has passed since the United States itself wanted working class boys from Turkey to go fight other workers in Iraq, however the Turkish bourgeoisie was unable to do this because of their inability to convince workers to go to war and because of their incapability and weakness. The truth is that the Turkish bourgeoisie has always aligned itself with the United States and the Turkish Armed Forces are standing ready to kill workers in Lebanon and Afghanistan if necessary. Thus, contrary to the lie the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie is trying to make workers believe, there is no conflicting interests between them and American imperialism, quite the contrary there is common interests and the Turkish Armed forces are armed executioners of this alliance. What is more is that not only will any massacre to be done in Northern Iraq will cause more soldiers to die and more "civilians" to be forced into concentration camps and massacred in battlefields, but also it will be countered with more bombs exploding in major cities.

The country has been shaken by the heroic civil service workers who are struggling for their own needs. Civil servants are fighting against a system which doesn’t even allow them to go on strike for their own needs. The state is offering them a wage rise of 4%, considering that inflation is about 8%, this rise is actually a decrease of 4%. Civil servants did not accept this, and they conducted a true class struggle against the state.Of course, other events were happening while civil servants were struggling. The PKK bombs which made one think that the timing couldn’t have been better for the Turkish state and of course the intense situation in Lebanon. Finally, the Turkish state decided to send troops to Lebanon.Soldiers sent to Lebanon will participate in an imperialist war, and of course this will be in the interests of the Turkish state. As nationalism is against the working class and class struggle by its nature, the state will attempt to destroy the class struggle for “national interests” by showing the children of workers whom it sent to Lebanon. This is why workers in Turkey should not only keep struggling, but also give the strongest reaction against sending troops to Lebanon.

On July 12, right after the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by the Hizbollah, Israeli president Ehud Olmert promised Lebanon a “very painful and far-reaching response”. During the early hours of July 13, the State of Israel started an invasion and pushed its working class into another nationalist and imperialist war. The Israeli state started this invasion for its own interests and without caring about the blood that would be shed. In fifteen days, about four hundred Lebanese civilians lost their lives. Not even the current ceasefire guarantees that the massacres won’t start again as the Israeli state showed that it would destroy anything threatening its own interests, not only with the last conflict but with the ongoing torture of the Palestinians.

May Day is the Day of the International Working Class

For too long May Day has been a ritual with no meaning for the working class. May Day was originally meant to be a day of international workers solidarity, but today on the May Day demonstrations all we see is leftists of various colours calling on the working class to back different nationalist groups. Whether it be the Turkish nationalist left calling for an ‘independent Turkey', and screaming against the imperialists while at the same time ignoring the fact that Turkey is a member of NATO, or those who disgusted by the state's barbarity in the South East side with the Kurdish nationalists, and their hideous mirror image of Turkish nationalism, or even the anti Americanism of the left loudly shouting "Yankee go home". What for? Then we can have our own ‘nice' Turkish capitalist bosses. All of this disgusts us. It saddens us that it is left to a small group of internationalists to defend the principles of international working class solidarity.