No to the constitutional amendments!
No to dictatorship and war!
For the unity of the international working class!
Build a socialist movement against war and social counterrevolution!
For the United Socialist States of Europe and the Middle East!
Build a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Turkey!

The April 16 referendum on amendments to the Turkish constitution raises issues of immense international importance. Given Turkey’s position at the crossroads between Europe and the Middle East, the outcome will affect workers not just in Turkey, but throughout the world.

Toplumsal Esitlik (TE, the Social Equality Group), in political sympathy with the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), calls for a “no” vote in the referendum.

The amendments proposed by the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) and backed by the fascistic Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) would hand control of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary to the president, establishing a dictatorship in all but name. The president could issue legislative decrees, draw up the budget, appoint the judiciary, dissolve parliament and nominate the ruling party’s candidates for parliamentary elections. The parliament would become a simple rubber stamp for the president.

The AKP proposed its constitutional amendments and imposed a state of emergency after the July 15 coup attempt. The coup was backed by Washington and Berlin, aimed at murdering President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and installing a puppet regime completely aligned with NATO’s war drive in Syria and Iraq. The coup was halted only by a mass popular mobilization. Broad social layers, above all in the working class, remembered the murderous record of NATO-backed coups of 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997 in Turkey. Hundreds died fighting to prevent the victory of another such coup.

Using the state of emergency, the Turkish government is already aggressively repressing the “no” campaign. Police have interned hundreds of “no” campaigners, and authorities have repeatedly threatened owners of venues where opponents of the referendum have tried to hold meetings. The Supreme Electoral Council has banned all but the 10 largest mainstream political parties and all non-governmental organizations, trade unions and associations from advertising or campaigning in the referendum.

The state terror against the “no” campaign is accompanied by the rise of right-wing populism and nationalism internationally. Trump advances his nationalist and militarist “America First” agenda. The European powers have responded to it by stepping up their own preparations for repression at home and war abroad, amid a major existential crisis following Britain’s vote to leave the European Union (EU).

While calling for a “no” vote, TE warns that rejecting the AKP’s proposed constitutional changes will not by itself halt the international drive to dictatorship and war. No support can be given to the “no” campaign of the AKP’s bourgeois opponents, including the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Both the CHP and the HDP previously agreed in discussions with Erdogan on the need for constitutional changes to the Turkish state, in which HDP proposed a presidential and federalist system.

Above all, however, these parties are even more closely aligned than the AKP itself with the policies of the major imperialist powers. There is little doubt that, should a “no” vote win, they will step up their collaboration with the imperialist powers’ attempts to remove Erdogan.

Speaking for pro-EU factions of the bourgeoisie, the CHP defends so-called “European values” and supports the AKP’s intervention in Syria, only criticizing the AKP for not acting firmly enough against Kurdish “separatism.” The bankruptcy of this pro-EU orientation is clear, as the EU governments whip up racism and anti-Muslim sentiment. In a deliberate attempt to divert attention from extreme social tensions in the Netherlands, the Dutch government banned appearances by Turkish government officials to speak for the “yes” campaign among Turks in Europe. This only played into Erdogan’s hands, allowing him to promote supporters of the “yes” campaign as victims of European racism.

The HDP speaks for sections of the Kurdish bourgeoisie and privileged layers of the Turkish middle class oriented to imperialism. It calls for constitutional changes that would grant minority rights to Kurds, Alevis and other minorities and ultimately lead to the construction of a Kurdish capitalist state entity backed by US and European imperialism. Its identity politics-based program is similar to that of Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the Left Party in Germany. These parties are deeply hostile to working people and have imposed austerity in line with the diktat of the EU and the IMF.

TE advocates a “no” vote in order to prepare an independent political struggle of the working class and youth in Turkey and across the Middle East and internationally, against both imperialism and the bourgeoisie in the Middle East. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the bankruptcy of world capitalism and the reactionary character of imperialism than the wars in the Middle East. Over a quarter century since the Gulf War of 1991, neo-colonial imperialist wars and the local ethnic and sectarian conflicts they unleashed have claimed millions of lives.

TE advances a revolutionary perspective for a counteroffensive of the Middle Eastern and international working class. It fights to unify workers and youth of Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic and other origins in Turkey and across the Middle East in a struggle against imperialism and the capitalist class in the Middle East, as part of an international struggle for world socialist revolution.

The Turkish referendum and the imperialist war drive in the Middle East

Erdogan’s attempts to establish himself as a dictator are not a product of his personal authoritarian tendencies, but of the desperate crisis of the Turkish capitalist regime. Over the last five years, the US-led imperialist war for regime change in Syria has expanded into an all-out regional war that triggered a civil war in Turkey’s Kurdish areas and Islamist terror bombings across Turkey. Ultimately, Erdogan himself ended up on a list of Middle East heads of state targeted for murder by imperialism, a list that has included the late Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the late Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

Erdogan’s proposed constitutional amendment shows that even the trappings of democracy in Turkey are no longer compatible with the militarist and dictatorial drive of the ruling class. As he moves to escalate Turkey’s military intervention in Syria and block the secession of majority-Kurdish regions of Turkey into a potential imperialist-backed Kurdish state, he can no longer tolerate internal political opposition. He must seek powers to crush opposition from rival sections of the bourgeoisie and from emerging opposition in the working class.

The conflicts driving Erdogan to seek dictatorial powers can find no solution in a national framework or under the leadership of any faction of the capitalist class. The wars and the inflaming of ethnic and sectarian tensions among populations divided by irrational borders drawn up by Britain and France a century ago, like the relentless assault on democratic and social rights, can only be stopped by an international revolutionary mobilization of the working class.

The drive to militarism and attacks on democratic rights are rooted in the deepening political and economic crisis of world capitalism. Since the 2008 Wall Street crash, capitalist governments around the world have imposed austerity policies and concentrated vast wealth in the hands of few. Since 2009, the wealth of the world’s billionaires has tripled. Only eight billionaires own as much combined wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population, some 3.6 billion people.

Extreme social inequality and militarism pave the way for the abandonment of democratic forms of rule by the capitalist class in every country, including in the imperialist powers of America and Europe, where the ruling class has a long history of parliamentary rule. Since 2015, France has been under a perpetually extended state of emergency that suspends basic democratic rights and was used to justify a brutal crackdown on protests against a reactionary labor law. Above all, in the United States, the election of Donald Trump has put in power a far-right administration and installed a neo-fascist, Stephen Bannon, as Trump’s main political adviser in the White House.

The world saw the initial stages of a revolutionary counteroffensive of the international working class six years ago, in 2011, when mass revolutionary struggles of the working class toppled US-backed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt.

Erdogan’s attempt to seize dictatorial powers flows from the war drive with which the imperialist powers responded to the Egyptian Revolution. Under pressure from NATO, the Turkish ruling class abandoned Erdogan’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy and backed imperialist wars for regime change in Libya and then in Syria, initially using Al Qaeda forces as proxies.

The Turkish ruling class adopted the politically criminal policy of supporting a vast network of CIA-backed terrorist groups along its border with Syria, hoping that the war could establish the Islamist AKP government as a dominant regional power. Its hopes were soon dashed, however. Instead, Turkey was engulfed in an imperialist maelstrom that threatens to erupt into world war.

Erdogan could not adapt to all the twists and turns of imperialist policy. In 2013, the AKP’s calculations were upended when its NATO allies supported the military coup in Egypt that came to power by politically manipulating popular opposition to the Islamist government of President Mohammed Mursi, after which Washington postponed its plans to go to war in Syria to aid its Islamist proxies.

In 2014, the Islamic State (IS) militia launched an invasion of Iraq from Syria that threatened Washington’s puppet state in Iraq and prompted a renewed NATO intervention in Iraq.

Washington and its European allies ultimately settled on a strategy of using Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish nationalist groups sympathetic to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) as its main proxies, instead of the so-called Free Syrian Army backed by Ankara. The AKP government saw this policy as a fundamental threat to the territorial integrity of Turkey, however.

While Ankara joined the US-led war ostensibly against IS, it aimed above all to prevent the consolidation of a Kurdish-controlled region in Syria adjacent to Turkey’s southern, majority-Kurdish area. Ankara simultaneously stepped up its offensive against Kurdish nationalist groups aligned with Washington, ending the “peace process” with the PKK. With US backing, it threatened to seize and occupy an enclave in northern Syria, supposedly as a “safe zone” for Syrian refugees.

Amid the escalating confrontation between NATO and Russia in Eastern Europe after the NATO-backed coup in Ukraine, Turkey’s threats proved unacceptable to Moscow, which intervened in Syria to defend the Assad regime and attack IS. When Turkish forces shot down a Russian bomber along the Syrian-Turkish border in November 2015, Turkey faced the prospect of a war with a militarily superior Russian neighbor, potentially without the support of its NATO allies.

Together with the burden of 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, this led to a major shift by the AKP toward seeking a rapprochement with Russia and China, igniting to a bitter conflict with the Obama administration and its European allies. In July 2016, a section of Turkey’s military launched an abortive putsch out of NATO’s Incirlik air base, encouraged by the US and German governments.

Having escaped assassination thanks to the mass mobilization that defeated the coup, Erdogan imposed a state of emergency, increased repression and set about drafting a new constitution that would consolidate his power. He also ordered the Turkish army to launch its own invasion of Syria, “Operation Euphrates Shield,” against both IS and the Kurdish-nationalist People’s Protection Units (YPG), while escalating a brutal wave of domestic repression.

Under the state of emergency declared after the failed coup attempt, some 121,000 civil servants and soldiers, including some 29,800 teachers and 4,200 academics, were sacked and more than 41,000 people in state institutions arrested. At least 1,500 associations, 15 universities, hundreds of private schools, 177 media outlets and several trade unions were closed for their alleged links to supporters of the coup. Ankara accused Washington of being behind the coup via its support for the Islamist movement of US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, and demanded his extradition.

While pressuring the EU with the threat that Turkey will allow Syrian refugees to flee to Europe, Erdogan has pinned his hopes on a shift in US policy under Donald Trump, appealing to Washington to drop its support for the YPG in exchange for Turkey adopting a more anti-Iranian stance. Whatever Washington and the European imperialist powers do, making an alliance with the most far-right and nationalistic government in US history will prove no less disastrous for Turkey than the Turkish bourgeoisie’s support for the war drive led by Obama and his European allies.

The crisis of the nation-state system in the Middle East

The past quarter century has refuted the claims of bourgeois ideologists that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the final triumph of capitalism and the end of the struggle of the working class for socialism, which a century ago produced the 1917 Russian Revolution. Freed from the military and political obstacles posed by the existence of the USSR, imperialism instead tried to turn the clock back and brutally re-colonize the Middle East.

US imperialism sought to compensate for its industrial and economic decline vis-à-vis its European and Asian rivals through military means. It launched the first Gulf War with the support of the Soviet bureaucracy, which was itself preparing capitalist restoration in the USSR. The aim of this war was to establish US dominance over the Middle East and the oil and energy reserves that are at the heart of the world economy. During the ensuing quarter century, imperialist wars spread across the region and turned it into the center of a global war drive of US imperialism, also aimed at Russia and China, in a desperate and ultimately futile bid to maintain Washington’s position as the world’s superpower.

Today, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen are barely functioning societies, torn apart by ethnic and sectarian warfare unleashed by imperialist wars and occupations. Entire societies lie in ruins, millions of people have been killed and tens of millions forced to flee their homes. Thousands of refugees have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe, as the EU pursues a savage anti-refugee policy.

This crisis is exposing the historic bankruptcy of capitalism. In the wars now shaking Syria and Iraq, the imperialist powers in the US and Europe, Russia and regional powers like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran are all seeking through escalating bloodshed to redraw the map of the Middle East as much as they can in their own interests. At each step, this reactionary conflict threatens to escalate into a direct military clash between nuclear-armed powers, threatening the survival of humanity itself.

The world is witnessing a terminal crisis of the state system that emerged in the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I a century ago—in the 1916 Sykes-Picot accords dividing the Levant between Britain and France, and in the 1923 Lausanne Treaty that fixed Turkey’s present-day borders. Every ruling class in the Middle East fears ethnic and sectarian separatism and insurrections of the working class and oppressed masses.

All the political and historical issues left unresolved in the founding of the Turkish Republic, created in 1923 after a three-year war of independence against imperialist occupation, acquire explosive force today. The Turkish nationalists trampled the cultural and political rights of Turkey’s largest minority, the Kurds, who constituted about 20 percent of the population—even refusing to acknowledge their existence as a nationality with its own language and culture. They also bloodily suppressed the workers’ movement. Nearly a century later, Turkey is beset by the same insoluble ethnic and class tensions.

Under 14 years of AKP rule, staggering social inequality has emerged in Turkey: the bottom 20 percent of the population (some 16 million people) lives with only 6 percent of the national income, equal to the wealth of the richest 35 people. The bottom 99 percent of the population witnessed a 13 percent decrease in its share of total national wealth, while the share of the top 1 percent rose to 55 percent. In Turkey, one out every five working-age people and one out every three youth is unemployed.

Today as a century ago, the turn is to the working class. As Leon Trotsky explained in his Theory of Permanent Revolution, in countries with a belated capitalist development, the capitalist class is incapable of establishing a democratic regime and overcoming the irrational borders and ethnic and sectarian divisions that are the legacy of colonial oppression. Its interests are fundamentally linked with and subordinate to those of imperialism. The working class alone can lead all the oppressed classes in a revolutionary struggle to halt the war drive and defend democratic rights in a struggle for socialism.

A revolutionary struggle for socialism and against war is by its nature international in scope. As Leon Trotsky wrote in The Permanent Revolution, “The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois society is the fact that the productive forces created by it can no longer be reconciled with the framework of the national state. From this follows on the one hand, imperialist wars, on the other, the utopia of a bourgeois United States of Europe. The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion, only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.”

The way forward is the unification of workers of all origins across the Middle East in a struggle against imperialism, for the overthrow of the region’s venal capitalist elites, and for socialism. In this struggle, the Middle Eastern workers will find allies in the workers in America, Europe and around the world, where there is deep opposition to the endless, bloody wars waged by Washington and its allies. They will give powerful support to a struggle of their class brothers and sisters in this region for the United Socialist States of the Middle East.

The pro-imperialist role of Kurdish nationalism

TE, like its co-thinkers in the ICFI, uncompromisingly defends the democratic and cultural rights of the Kurdish minority in Turkey and all ethnic and religious minorities across the Middle East. Our defense of democratic rights in no way implies, however, political support for bourgeois nationalist movements. The historical record of the Kurdish nationalist parties is a particularly sharp warning that their separatist and communalist programs, which divide the working class along ethnic, cultural and religious lines, is devoid of any genuine democratic or progressive content.

The war drive led by Washington in the Middle East since the 1991 Gulf War has exposed the Kurdish nationalists as tools of imperialism. In exchange for a few crumbs from imperialist plunder and exploitation, they have hired themselves out as proxy forces for imperialism.

The Kurdish nationalists, including the PKK, welcomed the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, even though Washington had tacitly backed Baghdad’s suppression of a Kurdish uprising just after the Gulf War. Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Massoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party had supported opposing sides of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war and fought each other during that conflict. However, they joined together in the corrupt Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq. The KRG worked with the US occupation and is now fighting in the US-led war against IS, also working closely with Turkey to transport KRG oil exports to world markets.

The AKP’s collaboration with the KRG led it to briefly set up a “peace process” with the PKK and Kurdish nationalists inside Turkey itself, to create a “democratic federation” where Turks and Kurds (in Turkey, Syria and Iraq) would supposedly live together in peace. This was to be accomplished above all on the backs of the working class. The Kurdish nationalists enthusiastically supported AKP proposals for a regional minimum wage in majority-Kurdish areas that would be lower than in other parts of Turkey—hoping to cut their own deals directly with international capital based on the super-exploitation of Kurdish workers.

This plan was shattered, however, when the Kurdish nationalist tendencies abandoned the AKP and oriented directly to US and European imperialism. The Syrian Kurdish YPG fighters, which work closely with the PKK, became the heart of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that are the imperialist powers’ preferred proxy force in the bloody war against both the Assad regime and IS.

Turkey’s Kurdish nationalist tendencies, emboldened by the support of the imperialist powers for fellow Kurdish nationalists, now propose the unification of Kurdish regions of Turkey with Kurdish-held regions of Iraq and Syria. At a December 2015 meeting of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), a platform of Kurdish nationalist parties, associations and movements, they declared: “The Kurdish people have started a process of struggle, based on their own strength, after the rejection of their demand for legal and political status.”

Opening the DTK congress, HDP co-chairman Selahattin Demirtas said: “This resistance will end with victory, and everyone will respect the people’s will. Kurds will from now on be the political will in their own region. During these days when a historical breaking point is emerging, our people will decide whether [to live in] dictatorship or freedom and whether to live under one man’s tyranny or in autonomy… Perhaps, Kurds will have their own independent state, the federal state, and cantons and autonomous regions as well.”

The war is rapidly exposing the fraudulence of claims that setting up a Kurdish capitalist state will bring national liberation and offer the Kurds peace and prosperity. Setting up an imperialist-backed Kurdish regime, ruled by small bourgeois cliques working closely with international oil companies amid an escalating war drive throughout the region, will only produce a disaster.

It would not bring national liberation but inflame national tensions in the Middle East. Already in Iraq, Kurdish forces are seizing areas where the Kurdish population is a small minority. Iraqi Kurdish forces have occupied the oil rich Arab-majority city of Kirkuk since 2014 and are now providing manpower for the bloody imperialist-led offensive against IS forces in Mosul, an ethnically diverse, Sunni Arab-majority city.

At the same time, the Turkish regime seized on calls for the formation of a Kurdish state to invade Syria, as well as to mount a vicious and reactionary crackdown on the HDP and the Kurdish people inside Turkey itself. Last year, the Turkish army launched Operation Euphrates Shield to prevent the Syrian Kurdish forces from seizing the city Manbij, and thus creating a Kurdish-controlled enclave along the entire Turkish-Syrian border. While the Syrian Kurds retreated and forestalled an all-out Turkish-Kurdish war, the Turkish army started a new bloody and costly war inside Syria itself.

The perspective of bourgeois nationalism has failed. The task facing the Kurdish workers and oppressed masses is not to build a new capitalist state working with imperialism and complicit in its crimes. The only way forward is to unite in struggle with their class brothers and sisters of all nationalities across the Middle East, as well as in the imperialist countries, in a struggle against war and neo-colonial oppression, for the building of socialism across the Middle East and the world. In the Middle East, this means a struggle for the United Socialist States of the Middle East.

Against pseudo-left apologists of imperialism

The “no” campaign of the fraternity of petty bourgeois, pseudo-left parties in Turkey, which have long orbited around the HDP together with sections of the trade union bureaucracy, is politically reactionary. While superficially criticizing the imperialist powers and the Iraqi Kurdish regime, whose ties to Ankara are well known, they tacitly back US-led interventions across the Middle East, above all by politically supporting Kurdish nationalist movements.

They have now launched a pro-EU “no” campaign, lined up behind the CHP and HDP based on identity and left-colored populist politics. They defend the Turkish so-called “democratic, secular, social law state,” and sow illusions that the victory of a “no” vote will free Turkey from “Erdogan fascism” and pave the way for an “independent, democratic and secular Turkey.”

On January 19, the Freedom and Solidarity Party (ÖDP) issued a statement declaring, “NO is good; NO is lively; NO is hopeful; NO is promising.” Shortly afterwards, the United June Movement, a collection of pseudo-left organizations, justified its “no” campaign with arguments: “We are not happy. There is a wave of hatred and horror around us… By destroying secularism, political Islam is taking away our possibilities of coexistence and liberty.”

On February 6, the Peoples’ Democratic Congress (HDK), a union of pseudo-left political parties, organizations and trade unions supporting Kurdish nationalists that was formed in 2011, declared that it would vote no, “for a democratic, pluralist, egalitarian, secular, libertarian, ecologic and social constitution” and “a democratic Turkey.”

Representing the interests of affluent sections of the middle class seeking a better position under capitalism, these organizations are obsessed with identity politics focused on ethnicity, religion, culture, gender, individual lifestyle and sexual orientation. The reactionary implications of such politics are perhaps most clearly expressed in the record of their political co-thinkers in the imperialist countries of America and Europe.

Groups like the International Socialist Organization in the United States, France’s New Anti-capitalist Party and Britain’s Socialist Workers Party hailed the imperialist war drive against Libya and Syria as a “democratic revolution” and gave full support to imperialist war. At the same time, their allies that have taken power at the local or national level—Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the Left Party in Germany—have imposed drastic austerity measures on workers and brutally crushed strikes. These parties are proven enemies of the working class.

The subjective hatred their Turkish co-thinkers feel for Erdogan, in line with their lifestyle concerns, only reflects their more fundamental alignment with imperialism. For this reason, they took an indifferent, politically complicit position during the July 15 coup attempt—criticizing it in words only after the coup had failed, when Washington and Berlin themselves were forced to issue pro forma condemnations of the coup attempt. The Revolutionary Workers’ Party, the sister organization of Greece’s Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK), even declared that calling on workers to take to the streets against the coup was irresponsible!

The TE seeks to establish the political independence of the working class by demonstrating the political and class gulf separating its struggle for Trotskyism in the Middle Eastern working class from the petty bourgeois politics of the pseudo left groups. It is only through this struggle to clearly differentiate the interests of the international working class from those of the Turkish bourgeoisie that the working class can be prepared for the struggle for power.

Build sections of the ICFI in Turkey and across the Middle East

A revolutionary struggle of the Turkish and international working class can only be led by an internationalist socialist leadership independent of, and opposed to, all bourgeois parties and their pro-imperialist, pseudo-left allies in the middle class.

A century ago, amid the slaughter of the World War I, the Russian working class led by the Bolshevik Party took power and established the world’s first workers’ state in October 1917, demonstrating the possibility of a world without exploitation, nationalism and war. It was the response of the Russian workers to World War I, based on the decades-long struggle for revolutionary internationalism of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party within the working class, against all petty-bourgeois tendencies.

Today, as a century ago, the crisis of capitalism threatens humanity with the horrors of world war. However, these objective conditions also radicalize workers around the world and drive them into struggle, from the Middle East and Asia to the centers of world imperialism in America and Europe. The first major revolutionary experience of the working class in the 21st century occurred in 2011 when, after an initial uprising of workers in Tunisia, the Egyptian working class rose up and toppled the dictator Hosni Mubarak.

The great problem that arose was that no revolutionary leadership modeled on the Bolshevik Party existed to lead the working class in taking power. Vast masses of workers rose up many times against the imperialist-backed regime in Egypt and its security forces. Nonetheless, they could not improvise a perspective upon which to take power. Rather, power fell first to an army junta, then into the hands of an unpopular Islamist government led by Mohammed Mursi, and finally back to the army. This was made possible due to the active collusion with the junta of the nominally-liberal bourgeois and pseudo-left opposition parties and their suppression of any independent political action by the working class.

The fundamental question is the building of a revolutionary party in each country to lead the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish a workers’ government pursuing socialist policies. The political and theoretical basis of this struggle, as of the October Revolution in Russia, is Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.

The ICFI is the only political tendency that has for decades since its foundation fought to advance and defend the perspective of Permanent Revolution, in opposition to all petty-bourgeois opponents of Trotskyism, as the continuator of Marxism. The construction of a revolutionary leadership of the working class means building a Socialist Equality Party, a section of the ICFI, in Turkey and in every country.

TE fights for the construction of the Socialist Equality Party (Turkey), taking it as its central responsibility to develop, prior to the outbreak of broader mass struggles, a significant political presence within the working class—above all, among its most advanced elements—in collaboration with the ICFI. We appeal for class conscious workers and socialist-minded youth in Turkey and across the Middle East to give TE their support.

To contact the ICFI, click here.