The coming period is a time to reinvigorate inert forces of the party base, to intensify the training of new forces, to form more widespread connections with the masses and increase the determination and audacity of political action.
“Our organised power is very limited, so we can’t plan effective agitations and actions.” “We cannot overcome the tasks of political struggle with our current strength.”
Such outlooks, which appear from time to time among the militants of the communist vanguard, undoubtedly stem from a periodic political-organisational reality. Indeed, there is a significant difference in between the scale of the tasks of political struggle and that of our organised forces.
Since inaugurating a new fascist coup process with the Suruç massacre on July 20 2015, Erdogan has been escalating state terror and psychological warfare in an effort to push the leading forces of the antifascist resistance into the vortex of ideological-political liquidation. The Palace regime’s uninterrupted assault corresponds to a war for the organisational will of the communist vanguard, in which guard posts are constantly emptied and replenished, militancy diminished and reproduced, organisations broken, re-established and broken again.
On the other hand, the regime, having exhausted its means of fortifying the material and moral foundations of fascism, is powerless to stop the accelerating meltdown in its own mass base. State terror and psychological warfare have been unable to prevent the toiling and oppressed masses from breaking the silence and returning to a position of active defence. A new era is dawning on the vanguard path, where the possibilities are accumulating and maturing for an antifascist mass leap forward. This new period of political struggle, characterised by a general feeling among the oppressed masses that the knife is on the bone, and an increasingly fierce desire to revolt for honour and freedom, offers new opportunities for amassing to the foremost positions of struggle and growing the organisational ranks.
This objective contemporary unity of counter-revolutionary risks and revolutionary possibilities, which characterises the new era, demands the party must deal with the destabilising organisational consequences of the ongoing attacks, as well as adopt a pioneering attitude to political struggle capable of realising the possibilities of antifascist mass breakthrough. Revolutionary history is made not under favourable conditions as we desire them; but under conditions as they are, with a firm grasp of the revolutionary possibilities contained therein.
To put it more concretely, walking under uninterrupted fascist volley fire defines a kind of “fate” for the communist vanguard. The power to push its energy to the limit of such conditions, in order to do justice to the tasks of the political struggle, is the very raison d’etre of the communist vanguard.
The revolutionary equation therefore cannot be expressed by enumerating the limits of organisational forces as an absolute obstacle to effective political struggle, by weighing political goals against the problem of organisational reality, or seeking to resolve the disproportion by reducing the former rather than increasing the latter. On the contrary, limited organisational forces can only be grown on the basis of efficiency in political struggle. Indeed, the concrete aim to which the current tasks of political struggle are connected is to turn the advanced sections of the working class and oppressed into a “political army”.
When the point of departure is the given organisational reality, and politics are shaped accordingly crippling organisational shrinkage. But when the current political tasks are taken as the starting point, and the organisation shaped according to politics, a pioneering approach can reveal the possibilities of organisational leaps forward.
The main tasks are to prepare the defence of the Istanbul Convention, to repel the HDP closure case, to increase opposition to the colonial occupation in Metîna, Avaşîn and Zap, to uphold the resistance at Boğaziçi and intensify the industrial struggle. If addressed with clarity of purpose, every pioneering action of resistance on these agenda will surely ferment the mass antifascist breakthrough of the oppressed.
The pioneering style of agitation and action is to uncover potential forces to organise. In turn, the practice of organising potential forces is the basis for the communist vanguard to ensure its organisational continuity. This organisational will and practice can by no means be left to the wind of spontaneity.
Can it be said that a communist cadre who often refers to the limitation of organisational power, but does not attempt to recruit party sympathisers as to distribute the socialist press, is not caught up in the wind of organisational spontaneity? Is this style of a communist worker justifiable, who has participated in countless street protests, but has never thought of bringing a few workers from the party periphery with him? Could a communist youth who decided to organize a mass panel, but did not realise a widespread mass announcement, did not plan to invite hundreds of students and encourage them to participate with this event, be expected to get the full benefit from this event? Would a communist woman who expressed her claim to strike against repealing the Istanbul Convention, but was hesitant to enact this claim by engaging with working women, arranging at least a few house gatherings, have acted in accordance with her claim? Could a communist organiser who complained about the scarcity of trained militants against the abundance of revolutionary tasks, but was consistently sluggish in training his less experienced comrades, solve the problem he was talking about? Could a communist militant be considered to have fulfilled his duties, who was full of revolutionary self-confidence on the police barriers but did not show the same zeal in organising the party in his neighborhood?
The coming period is a time to reinvigorate inert forces of the party base, to intensify the training of new forces, to form more widespread connections with the masses and increase the determination and audacity of political action.
Finally, we must emphasise that success in integrating these political and organisational tasks will require the most dedicated and effective leadership; to never allow the general accumulation to be disconnected from local organisations and cadres; to constantly refresh their political horizons and assertions; to ensure that they continually assimilate the periodic goals of daily activity, and reawaken their practical energy again and again.