The aim of this Bulletin is to give information about the practical, political and theoretical activities of the TDKP among the workers, youth and working people's movement in Turkey and Turkey-Kurdistan, and the problems of the movement.
The Bulletin will also give importance, within the natural context of a bulletin, to expressing the Party's experiences and the conclusions it has drawn from its activities. By doing this we hope that the possibilities for mutual benefit and for concrete relations with other parties and organisations, which are a part of the international communist, democratic and progressive movement, will expand. It is obvious that this will also help advance the common struggle against imperialism and the international reactionary forces.
The Bulletin will not only have articles translated from the Party's periodicals and literature, but it will also include articles that will fill the information gap regarding the history of the workers' and communist movement in Turkey, the stages that this movement has gone through, and its characteristics.
The Bulletin is published in English and comes out as frequently as possible.
BRIEF INFORMATION ABOUT THE TDKP
The Revolutionary Communist Party
of Turkey (TDKP) announced its foundation at its First
(Foundation) Congress held on 2 February 1980. However, the roots
of the communist movement in Turkey and the process of the TDKP's
construction go very far back.
The TDKP was founded in an ideological struggle against the
opportunist heritage and tradition. TKP (The Communist Party of
Turkey) was the first communist party in Turkey. It was founded
in 1920 as a branch of the Communist International. A short while
after its foundation, the founders of the party, under the
leadership of Mustafa Suphi were murdered as a result of a plot
by the Kemalist movement. Although TKP remained as a member of
the Comintern in the following period, it followed a
compromising-opportunist and bourgeois-tailist policy.
What remained in the name of communism in Turkey was the TKP's
opportunism until the late 1960s when the People's Liberation
Army of Turkey (THKO) and other radical revolutionary
organisations were founded.
The TDKP developed from the THKO. It was founded by Deniz Gezmis,
Yusuf Aslan and Huseyin Inan, who were executed on 6 May
1972, and by some other revolutionary youth leaders. It was an
organisation of struggle against imperialism and the fascist
dictatorship. It was founded as a reaction against the
compromising passivist tradition of revisionism. It represented
the disillusionment with revisionism. However, on the other hand,
it remained as a Guevarist petit-bourgeois organisation which
could not go beyond the platform of revisionism in the
ideological sphere. It was eventually subjected to the blows of
the dictatorship. Its leaders and militants were murdered either
on the gallows or in the mountains.
In 1975 a new process started with self-criticism and continued
until the foundation of the TDKP in 1980. This was the Party's
construction process in which it was orientated towards the
working class and Marxism-Leninism. It was also a process in
which an intense struggle was carried out as a part of the
International Communist Movement led by comrade Enver Hoxha and
the Party of Labour of Albania against Krushchevite modern
revisionism, petit-bourgeois revolutionaries and Maoism. Also in
this period tens of thousands of workers, labourers and
youngsters were organised and mobilised for the struggle against
fascism. Within this foundation process, our organisation lost
about 200 martyrs in this struggle.
With the military fascist coup that took place seven months after
the TDKP's First Congress, our country underwent the darkest
years of intense reaction in its history. The Party was subjected
to the attacks of the enemy. As a result of this and of its
shortcomings it suffered heavy blows.
These blows of the enemy were accompanied by the inner-party
liquidationist-opportunist offensive. The Party was on the verge
of liquidation. The process of re-organisation of the Party and
mobilisation of its forces began in 1987.
With the cleansing of the Party the liquidationist groups that
had emerged as a reflection of intimidation and submission in the
face of the anti-socialist winds blowing in a world scale and of
the terror of fascism and which had tried to seize the Party
centre, the TDKP opened the way to resume its fundamental tasks.
The Party's First General Conference of February 1990 constituted
a platform on which this process was re-evaluated and the
necessary conclusions were drawn. Also the revolutionary tasks on
both the national and international scale were set and various
decisions on political, organisational and tactical themes were
made.
Under the heavy oppression of fascism, the TDKP is entirely
organised illegally. Its main fields of work are the industrial
centres where the proletariat is concentrated. It is working
among the youth and other working strata in the towns and the
working class, poor peasantry and the youth in Kurdistan. The
TDKP is making further efforts to become a mass party, composed
of strong workers' organisations which represent the most
advanced elements of the working class and which has roots within
the class.
The Revolutionary Communist Party of Turkey is struggling against
imperialist plunder, heavy exploitation and oppression, national
oppression and the fascist dictatorship which is the form of the
hegemony of the bourgeoisie and the big land owners in Turkey and
Turkey-Kurdistan. It is struggling to establish a
revolutionary-democratic people's power and to build socialism.
As the Turkey and Kurdistan branch of the International Communist
Movement TDKP is acting with the perspective of proletarian
internationalism and of world revolution.