Un sabor a plaza Tahrir en plaza
Taksim
Por Sungur Savran (*)
Desde Estambul
The Bullet, 01/06/2013
La Haine, 05/06/2013
Traducido del inglés por Germán
Leyens
Estambul se ha convertido en un
campo de batalla cubierto de gas lacrimógeno. La policía,
sin duda a pedido del Primer Ministro Tayyip Erdogan y su
gobierno del AKP, ha estado atacando a manifestantes en el
centro de la ciudad, cerca de la Plaza Taksim, durante cinco
días consecutivos. En principio, eso no hubiera sido
ninguna noticia: la policía turca es famosa por su
brutalidad en el trato de manifestaciones indeseadas por el
gobierno. Hace solo un mes, el 1º de Mayo, había
dispersado una reunión de miles de trabajadores y
sindicalistas utilizando despiadadamente gas lacrimógeno.
De modo que no hay nada nuevo en el frente policial. Esta
vez es diferente por otro motivo.
La diferencia es la determinación
y audacia de los manifestantes. Durante los primeros cuatro
días llegó una cantidad creciente de personas, llegando a
muchos miles el jueves por la noche, es decir el cuarto día
de acción. Cada noche, establecieron un campamento en la así
llamada Promenade cerca de la Plaza Taksim. Cada noche, en
las primeras horas de la madrugada, la policía atacó a los
acampados y desmanteló sus carpas, quemándolas en la
tercera y cuarta noche. Los manifestantes están tratando de
proteger la vida, la vida de árboles muy preciados en medio
de una ciudad con áreas verdes extremadamente limitadas. La
Municipalidad Metropolitana de Estambul, dominada por el AKP,
ha estado preparando el terreno para construir un centro
comercial (bajo la apariencia de un edificio histórico) en
el lugar en el cual se encuentra actualmente la Promenade.
Brutalidad policial
La pura brutalidad de la policía
y de algunos matones de civil que afirman ser policía
municipal (fueron los que quemaron las caras) provocó la
movilización de la gente de Estambul para ayudar a los
manifestantes atacados. Istiklal, la principal arteria que
va de Taksim varios kilómetros hacia el sur, una zona
peatonal que es el corazón de la cultura, la política, el
entretenimiento y, recientemente, del turismo, estuvo pronto
repleta de gente desde el principio al fin, mientras la
propia Plaza Taksim estaba controlada por la policía.
Istiklal resonó con coros contra el gobierno, y algunos
llegaron, de un modo algo apresurado, a predecir su
inminente caída.
Ha habido demandas desde hace un
cierto tiempo de que el Ministro de Exteriores, responsable
por la criminal política del gobierno en Siria, y el
Ministro del Interior, a quien llamamos “Muammer Químico”
como referencia a “Alí Químico” del gobierno de Sadam,
sean removidos de sus cargos. La remoción del segundo se ha
convertido directamente en el objetivo. Esta noche ya había
rumores no confirmados de que el jefe de la policía de
Estambul ha sido despedido. ¡Incluso si fuera cierto, lo
que sería demasiado optimista, no es donde debe detenerse
la limpieza!
La clase trabajadora, las fuerzas
de izquierdas y la juventud de Turquía están saliendo de
un período de extrema pasividad política. Con la excepción
de la incesante lucha librada por el pueblo kurdo, Turquía
ha sido un desierto en cuanto a las luchas de masas durante
por lo menos los últimos 15 años, interrumpido
excepcionalmente por la lucha de los trabajadores de Tekel
(la compañía de tabaco y bebidas alcohólicas, privatizada
anteriormente) en el invierno de 2009-2010, traicionada por
desgracia por la burocracia sindical. Por lo tanto sería
apresurado decir que el movimiento ya se encuentra en un
punto sin retorno. Pero el espíritu es definitivamente de
recuperación de la confianza en sí mismas por parte de las
masas.
Lo que es más importante es ver cómo
reaccionará la clase trabajadora organizada. Últimamente
ha habido varias acciones industriales de importancia. Podrían
radicalizar la actitud de algunos sectores de la clase
trabajadora, incluidos los trabajadores de Turkish Airlines.
Han estado en huelga durante una quincena presentando
reivindicaciones serias, pero con una participación
limitada. Su demanda central es la rehabilitación de 305
trabajadores, despedidos hace un año por una huelga salvaje
en protesta contra la prohibición parcial de las huelgas en
la aviación civil, que ha sido un derecho reconocido en el
último medio siglo. La prohibición de huelgas tuvo que ser
revocada, pero los trabajadores despedidos aún no han sido
rehabilitados.
Más huelgas
Se espera que tenga lugar otra
huelga, que podría tener consecuencias devastadoras para el
gobierno. Es la huelga de los trabajadores metalúrgicos que
ya ha sido anunciada (una condición legal previa), pero aún
no ha sido iniciada. Si todos los trabajadores involucrados
se declaran en huelga (por motivos legales esto tendría que
ser durante el mes de junio), esto representará más de
cien mil trabajadores, en un sector que se ha convertido en
el principal motor de la exportación de la industria
manufacturera del país en los últimos años. Aunque hay
que considerar factores inmensamente complicados al analizar
esta huelga potencial, no solo la posición política
claramente reaccionaria de la burocracia dominante en el
mayor sindicato en la industria, los resultados pueden ser
calamitosos en el contexto de esta explosiva situación.
La historia parece estar ayudando
a las masas populares de Turquía. KESK, la Federación de
Sindicatos de Empleados Públicos, una de las organizaciones
combativas dentro del movimiento sindical, ya había
declarado una huelga de todo el sector para el 5 de junio.
Esto tiene que ser transformado en una huelga general,
adoptada por todo el movimiento sindical, presentando
demandas en la esfera política así como expresando las
considerables quejas de los trabajadores de diferentes
sectores e industrias. Actualmente se presencia una revuelta
popular ante la arrogancia y práctica represiva del
gobierno. Si esto se combinara con un movimiento insurgente
de la clase trabajadora, Turquía se abriría a todo tipo de
cambio revolucionario.
No se puede exagerar el tremendo
impacto que tendría una transformación revolucionaria de
Turquía en el resto de Medio Oriente y el Norte de África.
Bajo Erdogan, Turquía se ha convertido en un actor decisivo
en la región, un “aliado modelo” de EE.UU., un modelo
para los recientemente tambaleantes gobiernos musulmanes de
Egipto y Túnez, un combatiente de primera línea para el
frente suní establecido por los reinos saudí y catarí en
una confrontación sectaria potencialmente desastrosa entre
los frentes suní y chií en la región y una creciente
potencia económica y militar con un proyecto hegemónico.
La eliminación de este protagonista reaccionario y su
posible reemplazo por una fuerza progresista al mando de
este miembro de la OTAN tendrá inmensas repercusiones en
toda la región. La solidaridad con los movimientos de masas
de Turquía ayudará definitivamente a los objetivos
progresistas y revolucionarios en todo Medio Oriente.
Estambul 3 a.m.
Acabo de abandonar otra plaza
central de Estambul, no lejos de Taksim. La plaza está
repleta de miles de personas y incluso se ve a miles,
decenas de miles de coches que se mueven lentamente hacia
esa plaza. No habría nada extraordinario al respecto… si
no fueran las tres de la madrugada. Ankara, la capital,
también está manifestando hoy. Izmir, la tercera ciudad
por su tamaño en el mar Egeo, sigue viva, y las protestas
callejeras continúan.
Un bloguero dijo anoche: “¡Bueno,
Tayyip Erdogan, mediante su arrogancia, ha terminado por
unir a turcos y kurdos, suníes y alauíes y seculares!”
Bueno, es lo que hemos estado diciendo todo el tiempo. Es lo
que sucedió cuando los trabajadores de Tekel iniciaron su
lucha de dos meses y medio. Es lo que está sucediendo ahora
en una escala mucho más gigantesca.
Todavía no es Tahrir. Pero las
manifestaciones en los dos continentes de Estambul, Asia y
Europa a las tres de la madrugada, es algo decididamente
inusual y tiene un sabor a Tahrir. Todavía no es una
revolución, pero el aire de Estambul no está solo marcado
por el gas lacrimógeno. También hay un perfume de
aspiraciones revolucionarios.
* Sungur Savran es editor del periódico
“Isci Mucadelesi”
(Lucha de los Trabajadores) en Estambul, Turquía.
C’est
une
revolte, pas (encore) une revolution![1]
Yes, this is a rebellion, the revolt of a whole people against an
oppressive government that has overseen processes of brutal
exploitation
By Sungur Savran (*)
The Bullet, June 5, 2013
On May Day 2013, the police poured tonnes of tear gas on tens of
thousands of workers and youth in different quarters of
Istanbul, Turkey in order to stop them from approaching
Taksim Square. The government had decided that this square,
the traditional venue for May Day celebrations and home to
daily political actions big and small, was to be shut to
demonstrations this year because development work was being
done on a massive scale involving huge excavated pits making
it dangerous for crowds. In a ludicrous act, the governor of
Istanbul stood atop a mound at the edge of one of those pits
to hold a press conference in a desperate attempt to drive
home the threat that these pits represented for people.
Exactly one month later, on Saturday June 1, the masses protesting
against the urban plans behind this development work and
against the government itself had captured the square and
made it the freest part of Istanbul, or rather of Turkey!
The police withdrew that afternoon from Taksim Square to
abandon the place to the thronging crowds of protestors
unfathomably numbering in the hundreds of thousands! It has
now been three days and not one single soul has fallen into
the scarecrow pit! The symbolism is striking: This is the
biggest defeat for the AKP government and for Prime Minister
Tayyip Erdogan ever since the party came to power a decade
ago.
This is a fact of momentous importance. Despite the deep contradictions
within the Turkish bourgeoisie over the last decade, pitting
the Westernist-secularist dominant wing against the newly
ascendant Islamist wing, involving coup plots and
imprisonment of top brass, it is not any force from within
the ruling class, but the popular masses that teach Erdogan
his first serious lesson! For the hundreds of thousands of
people out on the streets and squares of at least 48 of the
91 provincial capital cities of the country and for the many
millions behind them supporting the struggle morally from
within their homes, nothing is taken for granted any more.
This is a mass of people shining forth with self-confidence
and a feeling that it is they who represent what is just and
right. They defy all the conventions and limitations of the
existing legal system regulating political activity.
Spontaneity and Heterogeneity
Yes, this is a rebellion, the revolt of a whole people against an
oppressive government that has overseen processes of brutal
capitalist exploitation over a full decade. But it is not
yet a revolution. For the people do want to bring the
government down (the major unifying slogan is “Erdogan
resign!” or “Government resign!”), but are not
organized, nor can they yet become organized so as to set up
an alternative government that represents their aspirations
and interests. This is not a struggle for power, but a
gigantic movement that has taken the whole (or almost the
whole, see below) country in its grip that cries out its
grievances and wants to remove from the scene what it sees
as the cause of all ills, the Erdogan government.
As in almost all the cases of revolutionary or pre-revolutionary outburst
around the Mediterranean basin within the last five years (Greece
December 2008, Tunisia and Egypt 2010-11, Spain 2011), the
revolt in Turkey is also a totally spontaneous one
uncontrolled by any single or several political or social
organization. This is both a strength and a weakness. It is
a strength in the early stages because it brings in the most
incredible sections and layers of society without fear of
manipulation by a political organization not to their liking.
It is definitely a weakness in the long term since if the
revolt were to turn into a revolution, this could only
triumph under the leadership of one or more political
parties with a strong following in the mass movement.
But even in the medium term (and, in this kind of concrete situation,
when we talk about the medium term, we are talking weeks, if
not days) it is also a weakness since it paradoxically
leaves the movement vulnerable to the machinations of wings
of the bourgeois political establishment that wish to
recuperate the movement through more subtle methods (refused
by Erdogan, who has persisted and signed) and this way put
an early end to the rebellion before it starts to get out of
hand and starts to threaten the bases of capitalist rule in
the country. This kind of alternative has already started
taking shape in the form of an alliance between Abdullah Gul,
the president of the republic (of AKP origin himself), a
political figure who is in political rivalry with Erdogan
for the next presidential elections, and Kemal Kilicdaroglu,
the leader of the CHP, the Turkish member of the misnamed
Socialist International. Since Erdogan has departed on a
tour of North African countries and since Bulent Arinc,
deputy prime minister acting as prime minister temporarily,
takes a line that is critical of Erdogan's stance also, they
will probably try to absorb the movement through some minor
concessions to the mass movement in coming days, with
Erdogan conveniently absent while soft methods alien to him
are being implemented. Behind this kind of solution would
stand at least TUSIAD, the organization of the pro-Western
wing of finance capital, if not other organizations of the
Turkish ruling classes. This kind of face saving resolution
of the problem is made all the more urgent since even at
this stage the capitalist economy is threatened by the
situation Turkey finds itself in. On Monday, day four of the
revolt but the first day when the Istanbul Stock Exchange
was open, the markets took a nose dive, closing more than 10
per cent on a catastrophic day.
On the other hand, the movement itself is extremely heterogeneous both in
class terms and in ideological-political orientation. In
class composition, one can easily assert that this is a
multi-class movement, with the modern sections of the petty-bourgeoisie
totally immersed in a Western life style, the intelligentsia,
the upper echelons of the proletariat and the youth in the
forefront. The working-class proper is not oblivious to the
movement, but has not yet either thrown its organized weight
behind the movement or put forth its specific class demands.
Ideologically and politically three broad tendencies may be discerned,
with infinite variations in each category. There is the
ecological sensibility, unfortunately marred by the left
liberalism (in the European sense of the term “liberal”)
of great parts of the left in Turkey, which makes them easy
prey to the machinations of what they would consider as the
“democratic” and “civilized” wing of the bourgeoisie.
There is, secondly, a very strong, one would even say
dominant, Turkish nationalist tendency, ranging from the CHP
through myriad Kemalist associations to the ex-Maoist,
Kemalist, quasi-fascistic Labour Party. And, of course,
there is the motley collection of Turkish socialist and
revolutionary forces, skilled and seasoned in street
fighting, but lacking in political acumen or programmatic
horizon.
The aspirations of the three tendencies are very different from each
other. For the ecological cum left liberal tendency, the
great dream is Turkey's accession to the European Union. So
any deal that makes TUSIAD happy would possibly leave them
satisfied as well. The nationalist tendency is divided
between Atlanticism and a pro-EU stance, on the one hand,
and a Eurasian orientation, on the other. However, both of
these sub-currents are united against the creeping
Islamization that the AKP has been carrying out successfully
over a decade. They are all “republicans,” i.e. they
defend Kemal Ataturk's principles and wish well to the pro-Western
wing of the bourgeoisie, that is, the wing represented again
by TUSIAD. (The contradiction that the reader may sense in
two very different tendencies represented by the left
liberals and the nationalists in their common support for
TUSIAD is a contradiction that exists in real life!)
The socialist left in its majority unfortunately tail-ends either one or
the other of the above tendencies. There is, of course, a
third major tendency that supports the Kurdish cause, of
which more in a moment. It is only if the major actors
missing for the moment come into the fray that the left can
even begin to pose an alternative solution to the crisis.
The Missing Actors
The fate of the great popular rebellion in Turkey will be decided by the
following questions: Will the Kurdish movement join the
rebellion or will it implicitly side with the AKP government?
And will the core battalions of the working-class come forth
with their class-based demands and forms of struggle?
On the first question, despite our whole-hearted support for the rights
of the Kurdish people, including self-determination, we feel
duty-bound to underline, without unfortunately being able to
go into detail, that the Kurdish movement is on the wrong
track in having accepted the terms of Erdogan for the so-called
“peace” process. This will oblige them to support the
expansionist and adventurist hegemonic role that the AKP
government seeks to establish for Turkey in the whole region
of the Middle East and North Africa and beyond. Even at this
early stage, when the “peace” process has hardly covered
any distance at all, it has also so far stopped them from
supporting the popular rebellion because this would, they
fear, throw cold water over their relations with the AKP
government and spoil the whole “peace” process. This,
one is forced to underline, is a most backward position for
what was once a national revolutionary movement with Marxist
leanings. In their defence, one should remember that for
three decades, while the Kurdish masses were being
persecuted and assassinated, most of the people out on the
streets now were looking the other way, if not lending
straightforward support to the criminal actions of the
Turkish state.
Regarding the working-class, one should face the truth squarely and admit
that at the polling booth, the core of the working-class has
been voting for Erdogan and that major battalions of the
class (from the metal workers to road and transport) are
regimented by extremely bureaucratic unions that bow before
the onslaught of the capitalist class and have recently
sought to secure the conditions of their own existence
through servitude to Erdogan. One most recent instance of
such shameless capitulation was seen in the heat of the
popular rebellion itself. The right-wing leadership of the
largest metal workers union had refused the terms of the
bosses’ organization and had proclaimed a strike
applicable some time in June. It then signed that same
collective bargaining agreement the very night when popular
anger grabbed the streets of Istanbul. A coincidence? Not at
all. The leader of this union has posed his candidacy for
the position of leader of the largest labour confederation
and is declaring his loyalty to Erdogan so that he can take
the job!
However, the working-class does display tendencies toward joining the big
revolt movement. There have been repeated marches, night
after night, in different working-class neighbourhoods on
the outskirts of cities such as Istanbul, Ankara and Antalya.
If only this potential could be mustered to form an
organized movement, the whole situation would promise to
change from one of rebellion with uncertain horizons to a
revolution with clear ends.
These are the hidden resources of the rebellion in Turkey. Should the
working-class come into the fight with its specific demands
and form of struggle, the whole balance of forces would
change. The class struggle federation that represents public
employees (KESK) had already declared a sector-wide strike
for 5 June. Should this be taken up by the rest of the union
movement and made into a general strike, the rebellion in
Turkey would make a giant step forward.
The other reserve force is, of course, the Kurdish national movement. The
cities of Turkish Kurdistan are as yet quiescent. Should
they decide to join their brothers and sisters of the rest
of Turkey, an explosion of unfathomable proportions would
shake Turkey, the Middle East and beyond.
* Sungur Savran is based in
Istanbul and is one of the editors of the newspaper Gercek (Truth)
and the theoretical journal Devrimci Marksizm (Revolutionary
Marxism), both published in Turkish. This article was
written on 4 June, 2013.
[1].-
“This
is a revolt, not (yet) a revolution!” A reference to
the famous conversation during the outbreak of the
French Revolution between King Louis XVI and one of his
advisors.
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