National Question
Turkey: Attacks on Kurdish Movement
Once again Turkish state is stepping up repression of Kurdish movement and Kurdish people. As usually it is accompanied by chauvinist frenzy stepped up after Cukurca raid by Kurdish guerrillas. As military operations go on in Kurdish provinces, especially in the border areas, there are many attacks by fascist gangs in the company of the police across the country against the Kurdish party BDP (Peace and Democracy Party) premises and Kurds. Ocalan has not been allowed to see his lawyers for more than 3 months. And media employ a strongly anti-Kurd language which is similar to 1990s.
Underestimation of Democratic Demands
An erroneous political tendency within Marxist movement still encountered
Imperialism is a world system that links all nation-states large or small to each other through diverse (and of course unequal) economic relations. For this reason, to defend that nation-states can even be fully independent in an economic sense despite the imperialist system is not overthrown by proletarian revolutions progressing on a world scale is a distortion of Marxism. In conclusion we have to point out once again that we must understand from national liberation nothing but achieving political independence. Economic liberation is a matter of social revolution.
The Viewpoint of the Proletariat on Defence of National Culture
In conclusion, tendency to give the proletariat a national consciousness is a reactionary one. And it is has been the attitude of all petty-bourgeois revolutionary leaderships who, on the one hand, proclaim themselves as “Marxist-Leninist” and on the other hand defend “national culture” in their all ideological and political practice. Rejecting the defence of “national culture” as part of proletarian internationalism is not only the task of the communists of the oppressing nation. This task is equally up to the communists of the oppressed nation.
On the National Question
The importance of theoretical struggle on national question springs essentially from the need to take a correct political attitude based on Marxist foundations in the face of the liberation struggle of oppressed nations. Marxism is not an impressionist or positivist philosophy limiting itself only with interpreting the world, but an integral world view which strives to change the world and develops in an inextricably dialectical relationship with revolutionary practice.
A Marxist Approach to the Problem of Cyprus
As membership of Cyprus to the EU draws closer, the pressure exerted by liberals in the Turkish press on Denktas (the president of the so-called, but unrecognised KKTC, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus) has been increasing. All of a sudden they have started to complain about how many millions of dollars Cyprus has cost Turkey in these hard times of economic crisis, and what a huge fetter this is for Turkey’s entry into the EU. The debate has swiftly turned into a blunt choice of “whether to abandon Cyprus or annex it”.
