This article originally written in Turkish language by Ibrahim Suphi, was published first in June 2014, in the special edition of the Partizan magazine It is in response to the propositions, analysis and the general line presented in the documents of the 3rd Congress of the MKP (Maoist Communist Party of Turkey and North Kurdistan). The MKP Congress was held sometime in 2013 and its documents were made public in Turkish language sometime in 2014.
We draw the reader’s attention to some major theoretical issues and controversies relating to the Marxist assessment of the current crisis, the mode of production in countries like Turkey, the strategy of protracted peoples war and the current situation in the world,… that is addressed by the author.
***
MKP has concluded its 3rd Congress and the Congress Documents have been made public. With a claim to capture that which is new and qualitative, the Congress, taking refuge under the pretext of radical and profound changes, has already secured a place in the history of revolutionary movement in Turkey as the entrenchment of liquidation by also formally and blatantly breaking away from its traditional roots and from the most important lines and principles of fundamental and general doctrines of scientific socialism.
With its contradictory theses, tiresome repetitions, superficiality, confusing disarray of unclear concepts, judgment dullness in understanding and interpreting the revolutionary theory, characterizations that are hastily dressed up in political embellishments, and with its clumsiness due to incapability and inadequacy in comprehending even the fundamentals of Marxist theory, put aside its current evolution, MKP, evidenced by its Congress Documents that are prepared in a "copy-paste" fashion with parts and bits taken from here and there, has gotten itself stuck in the anarchism-democratism layered liquidationist-revisionist swamp by turning away from its past program and from the gains of victorious revolutions while intending to analyze what is new in the class struggle.
By not being able to avoid the hacking impacts of the damage, degeneration, and destruction caused by the neo-liberalism fed global liquidationism; by taking a position against the party and its leadership in the name of the class, and against the dictatorship of proletariat, against this most important "principle" issue of the modern worker's movement, in the name of mass democracy, Congress is swung in the direction of disarming the proletariat, benefiting the bourgeoisie. It appears that MKP, playing around with terms such as party, state, leadership, discipline, and so on, has opened wide its doors to all those without direction, orientation, and aim. It is also on the way to becoming a safe boat for the freshwater revolutionaries and to those who see the top to down party discipline as a mangle.
Let us remind MKP, which cannot even stand the name of the proletarian dictatorship as the state of transition from capitalism to communism that, as it was witnessed in the example of Spain, it was not a joke by the history but a flaming reality that those who ride on this Bakunian horse, a descendant of anarchism, where toppled down from their gained positions by a handful of [pro-Franco] soldiers.
Even though embellished with a leap towards "left", the Congress, under the signboard of "left", winding along the shores of extremism, is preaching rightism, fresh water revolutionarism, and diluted socialism. Leaning on the pretext of breaking free from "static formalism as a one way out," with open and indignant attacks on the classics and the theory and practice of scientific socialism, the path followed is the one that step by step distances itself even from what is left of Marxism and its "formal" concepts. MKP, with this Congress, has dug a ditch between itself and Marxism by choosing to openly challenge the modern scientific socialism; launching attacks on the columns that sustain it.
Moreover, their criticism of Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, on the " basic principals " that find their expressions in his fundamental-theoretical documents, in other words on his analyses of the socio-economic structure [of Turkey], the character of the revolution, its strategy, its driving forces and the national bourgeoisie; their new "contributions" that turn their back on the democratic people's revolution, their misery on the subject of the strategy of protracted peoples’ war, and linked to this, their new "brilliant" analyses that crosses out the countryside as the primary areas of struggle, their caricaturisation of people's war, its replacement with the fallacy of "socialist people's war," their diagnoses as to the principle contradiction, and on the vanguard and fundamental forces, compose a bouquet that is obvious evidence that they have burned and destroyed all main channels and bridges that connect them to Kaypakkaya.
In this bouquet, there is no place either for Kaypakkaya or for his theory and practice. With all this upside down strategy and diametrically opposed contradictions, their false praises for Kaypakkaya sound like a cacophony that scratches ears. The MKP, caught up in an epidemic liquidationism, has not only put the guiding compass of Marxism in the closet but also that of Kaypakkaya's.
The MKP's "unique" Maoism too seems to have been done away with. There is no sign of "Maoism is a must!" This article, step by step through following the Congress Documents and the "theoretical rottenness" that dominates them, its anarchism-democratism layered right-revisionism, covered with "left revisionism," expressed in the context of "general evaluation", reviews, among other things, the Congress's superficial diagnoses on worldwide people's war and on the new developments in imperialism, its vapid take on the proletarian dictatorship and multi-party system, socialism, and the classics, and finally its approach that accuses the Proletarian Party [the Communist Party of Turkey / Marxist-Leninist - TKP/ML] as well as themselves with "not having seen the changes due to their unscientific conservative stubbornness."