August 13th,  2016 A propos the Turkish crisis: A fenced sub-imperialism that cannot expand to new spheres of influence, anchored between a Middle East in flames disciplined by NATO and an imperialist Europe of Maastricht in bankruptcy that does not allows her to enter the treaty zone The international conditions that are shaking and moving Turkey

How it was developed the political crisis in Turkey see more The military coup of July 15th... a late counterrevolutionary coup see more 2013/2014: The end of a cycle On the pact of PKK with Erdogan see more

We present here the position of the Marxist revolutionists facing the crisis that is in full development in Turkey. What happened in that country and conditions that take place are fueled by the international conditions that shape them, and the evolution of an open crisis which the Turkish State has entered is international as well.

There, weeks ago, Erdogan left a military coup to run of a minority fraction of the army, then crushed it and thus he could rise above all the bourgeois fractions, in fact featuring a backlash, which displaces the bourgeois opposition and seeks to conquer a national unity Government supported in the modern middle class that emerged in the last decade of capitalist expansion cycle in that country.

With this stroke, Erdogan has become the great Bonaparte to unify bourgeois gangs, nestled in the rich middle classes, with a first goal: giving a hard beat to the labor movement and preventing this from erupting - as it tried to do in 2013 / 2014 - in mass political struggle. The great Turkish bourgeoisie reunified its ranks, since it seeks to settle as policeman of the Maghreb and Middle East, something that the European imperialist powers and the USA do not allow.
The Ottoman Empire was already defeated in the First World War. But the conditions of crisis of the world domination regime, and especially the crisis of the counter-revolutionary devices of the imperialism in the Maghreb and Middle East (with the fall of Camp David, the impossibility of direct intervention of Zionism, the fall of Mubarak and Ben Ali in Egypt and Tunisia, respectively), push Turkey as gendarme of the NATO more and more to try to play that role and expand her dominance in the region.

Turkey is the sixth arms-exporter in the world. She has NATO military bases with nuclear warheads on her territory. Also 80% of the oil and gas from the Middle East and Caucasus pass through there. Before the intervention of Russia and Iran or Lebanese Hezbollah in the Syrian crisis, and not being Turkey able to intervene directly, that takes her to collide, both with Germany - who has denied her entering Maastricht - and with the US which prevents her direct intervention in the Middle East, other than disciplining the Kurdish nation in its territory, because US is directly responsible for doing that in Iraq and in Syria,.

 

Turkey, a fenced sub-imperialism

Turkey seeks to come out of her closure. Her capitalist gangs close ranks. They are looking to get a social base of masses for new counterrevolutionary offensive inside and outside Turkey. The country has clashed with Russia, jealous for her intervention in Syria. She has also collided with Great Germany, of which is a key importer. She has collided with the US, which prevents her from playing the role of policeman of NATO in the Middle East.
For the imperialists, the spheres of influence are conquered and lost in the war; and the world was already partitioned by the two world wars that followed one after the other in the first half of the 20th century. That’s why Turkey cannot occupy Syria and have it. Nor can she send her army there... much less to Iran or Lebanon. That would mean, as we have already said, the rebirth of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey is neither a semi colony nor a second-tier Republic, as Iraq, whose troops are mercenaries of some imperialist power. Turkey is an imperialist country. It is one of the largest military powers in NATO (see box).

All the oil and gas pipelines in the Middle East and the Caucasus pass through her territory, so she charges a commission and thus takes a huge oil income from all these oil and gas producing countries. However, Turkey has no oil on her own territory and cannot control any of the neighboring countries that do have it. It does not have permission to do so. That’s why the Turkish bourgeoisie encourages the Azerbaijan war with Armenia for control of Nagorno-Karabakh oil.

We are facing a sub-imperialism that does not find its place in the Europe of the Maastricht Treaty. Its exports are charged in dollars. But its imports are from Germany, and it has to pay them in euros, which is more expensive than the dollar. Thus, in the trade between Turkey and Europe, while charging in dollars but paying in euros, Germany and Maastricht keep a percentage of her profits. Every year they postpone Turkey’s joining the EU.

Turkey is an empire that was and which today can no longer be; she is neither European nor Asian, and much less since the outbreak of the crash in 2008, which marked that there are plenty of imperialist powers and a large part of them - not to say almost all the minor ones - are broken and subject under real "Treaties of Versailles". Italy is the last one that has fallen to the brink of bankruptcy, with its broken banks, as it happened yesterday with Spain, Greece and Portugal.

The "Great Turkey" without new wars, new inter-imperialist, political and military alliances, can never develop fully as such.

Erdogan first toppled Putin a plane and then apologized. It seemed that he was going to clash militarily with Russia on the border of Syria and then they met (including Iran) to "negotiate a settlement of the Syrian question" as well as their gas business, nuclear Central and agribusiness with Putin.
Erdogan fights with Germany because it does not let Turkey enter the EU and then meets the latter’s leaders to beg Turkey’s entry to Maastricht.
He fights with Obama as he denounces US government encouraged the coup in Turkey, though meanwhile he’s applying to letter Obama’s orders in Syria.

Turkey is a sub-imperialism which has accumulated, in the cycle of expansion in the last 10 years, a huge mass of capital which does not find spheres of influence in the region, nor inter-imperialist relations at the level of this position that she has conquered. Turkey gets crazy when she sees Saudi Arabia - a colony of BP- invading Yemen along with the United Arab Emirates; or at watching Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iranian ayatollahs and Russia enter Syria. Turkey is full of hate because she cannot invade Syria. Turkey is like a ping pong ball bouncing in a small closed room.

A few days ago, Erdogan traveled to Russia and embraced Putin, which he called "my dear friend". The fact is he also explores common business in the Caucasus along with Putin, while agreeing together under the orders of Obama, to strangle the Syrian revolution … Putin supporting directly genocidal Al-Assad on the battlefield and Erdogan controlling the bourgeois general FSA and Al Nusra, whom he prepares to hand out the revolution in a future deal with Bashar’s generals.

Thus, Turkey seeks to settle her affairs in the region. For Erdogan, the masses are simply small change.

 

Turkey has over itself all the contradictions of the revolution and the counterrevolution and the global economic crisis hitting all the imperialist powers of the world

The world crisis only worsens. USA never ceases to throw its crisis to the world. Wall Street financial oligarchy has in its large banks values without backing in goods for 263 trillion dollars (values in derivatives, futures, shares, mortgages, insurance, swaps, money basket, etc.). Crisis in China and the BRICs has shrunk all markets. Europe pushes brutally all imperialist powers into bankruptcy. Imperialist powers that emerged as winners from the commercial crisis of Maastricht have been Great Britain, France and Germany. And there is not even room for these three!
Again, the markets have narrowed more and more. That’s why England threatens with Brexit, negotiates with Germany her departure from the EU. Great Britain does not accept to pay for the crisis of Maastricht, or subsidize the euro nor the French farmers, but above all, she does not accept to subordinate herself to the political, economic and military agreements signed by France and Germany in the EU. She knows she is the world's fifth-largest power and was also a winner in the war.

Great Britain always saw herself as part of the Anglo-American imperialism, dominating the world along with the US. The latter, however, already treats her as a European power among others. USA doesn't think any more about marching with Great Britain to all its businesses in the world. It has lately considered her as an "exclusively Atlantic" power. Anglo-American imperialism business path has bifurcated. The US wants to go alone to the Atlantic – reaching an agreement with Germany, and Great Britain as any other power of the bunch - and also alone to the Pacific to conquer China.

But England is not only an Atlantic power, but also a Pacific one. In Hong Kong and Singapore she has two large military and financial bases. For this reason, Great Britain does not accept this new role that U.S. and Germany want to impose on her.

A huge new round of the world crack has opened. The economic crisis has worsened, disrupting the international division of labor and the relationship between the imperialist powers that emerged victorious from the last economic crash. The dispute has begun for semi-colonizing Russia and China, which are capitalist countries in transition which cannot be imperialist powers and whose only fate can be that of either domesticated semi-colonies or worker states through the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat in revolutionary ways.

Russian gas and military-industrial apparatus are coveted by Germany, France and the USA. The greed for Chinese slave labor, her state companies, her banks, pushed by an economic and customs opening in the middle of her economic morass, opened the road to a new surge of imperialist penetration and control of her business, as which opened in 197 in Chinese Southeast with Nixon-Deng Xiao Ping Deal.

So then an inter-imperialist dispute has aggravated. In the middle of the slump of the world crack, a crisis of the regime's mastery of the imperialism has been exacerbated that does not allow it to establish strategic defeats on the masses. The most serious crisis, ultimately, is that the US and European imperialisms have no fire power after their defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The working class of the metropolises does not allow it.
This is what pushes the imperialist gangs to attack their working class even more, as we saw in France, and impose a double looting to oppressed nations.

These conditions of "Iraq syndrome" is what pushes Turkey to untie her hands to act, she herself in the region as a policeman. Turkey demands it openly. That is what Erdogan’s Bonapartist plan is about and also the "national unity Government" that he wants to impose, to discipline the masses, to centralize the ruling oligarchy to bring "Great Turkey" back

This has strained the relations of Turkey with the rest of the imperialist powers of the world.

In Turkey, the world left -meticulously pro-YPG and which supports the actions of the Kurdish PKK in Iraq and Syria, announced that "the working class was that defeated the coup in Turkey". They figure out that "the exploited masses would have been which took to the streets and defeated, along with rank and file soldiers, the coup officers". This is science fiction. It is an invention, a movie that was never filmed.
Here it is clear that the great Turkey and Erdogan needed this coup to advance and impose a completely Bonapartist regime. Erdogan never called the working class to help him crush the coup. That had meant to call the Syrian, Turkish, Kurdish, workers and make them take arms to disarm the officers, supported by rank and file soldiers... this a bourgeois would never do, and much less Erdogan! The truth: already makes more than one century and a half that the bourgeoisie does not call the masses to arm themselves. They know how it ends, with armed workers and soldiers.
Erdogan had perfectly controlled the situation in the coup. Supported in a modern middle class enriched in a cycle of expansion of 2003 / 2013, after Turkey played a central role in US invasions to Iraq and Afghanistan, where in fact it transformed throughout its territory into a NATO military base, supported by the military party, which carries enormous weight in the history of Turkey; but, as we shall see later, it was Erdogan´s 'Islamic' bourgeois fraction which took over all businesses from the war. Today it ends taking off all other bourgeois fractions that still were fighting for it.

The reformist left does not discern the working class when it is in process of a civil war; as for example, within any of the revolutions of the Maghreb and the Middle East; not to mention within the huge political crisis and contradictions that hit and stress all classes and class sectors in Great Turkey.
The working class, which started huge processes of struggle in the Thaksin Square in 2013, and threatened with a rise for around 2014 - with the general strike- and 201, was brutally put down, attacked with bombings and military repression, especially the Kurdish labor movement. But not only the latter was recklessly attacked; we also saw a bomb placed in the massive March of Turkish workers in Istanbul for the First May.
The working class comes for what is theirs. As we will see later, after years of growth and economic expansion, the powerful Turkish labor movement has called its share of that growth. Though it does that just at the moment in which the economy expansion cycle was completed and stagnation and recession have just began -and as laws of this rotten capitalist system pose, generated wealth is not delivered in the cycles of economic expansion but otherwise, capitalism creates this wealth by multiplying per thousand the exploitation of the labor movement. And when the expansion cycle ends, it throws on the masses throughout the crisis mercilessly.

The Bonapartist tendencies in the political regime of Great Turkey express this double need for Turkish sub-imperialism. It has to fight for a new, aggressive, position as a regional power, negotiating its economic relations with the United States and Europe, plus hardening and shielding the regime to attack the labor movement, which is systematically threatening to start combat maneuvers.

The reformist left has been left already with no evidence. The facts condemn it. It cannot set that it has been the labor movement which has intervened to stop the coup together with the soldiers. That is a fallacy.

The Turkish working class is which suffers more the coup and its backlash by Erdogan. However it has the power and the authority already won to be an alternative to the great Turkish murderous generals and bourgeoisie
Its ally is in rebel masses of Syria, in the Palestinian people, in the fighting in Yemen and the entire Maghreb and Middle East. Its allies are in Paris, in Athens, in Ukraine... and in great Germany, where 1 million 200 thousand Turkish workers and their offspring carry out the worst jobs. Turkish workers are part of the German and European working class... they are part of the international working class. Towards the Middle East, Asia and Europe, there is where the great Turkey looks; the Turkish working must seek class allies there.

Turkish working class bears a decisive commitment in a decisive place, since it also comprises Kurdish and Syrian workers. It will resurface as internationalist working class and be the bulwark in disputing the leadership of the masses to the sinister Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish middle-classes, lackeys to US imperialism. Largely, the fate of the working class of the Maghreb and the Middle East is tied to the fate of the working-class in Turkey and the Kurdish oppressed nation, to the extent that this breaks with the bourgeoisie and the leaderships that, as Stalinism, subject it to that bourgeoisie.

Carlos Munzer