“Following in the footsteps of our immortals”, as we understand it today, is a slogan asking of us to prepare for the concrete and comprehensive revolutionary tasks that we are confronted with. For revolutionaries devoted to the immortals, it means being able to appoint one’s own direction and action, in the wake of any difficult moment and turn. It means to be determined like those who came before us. To be courageous and willing to sacrifice as they did.
“Oh, those who walk their lives like an epic/Who is it really, that’s alive/Who is it really that’s dying/Is it those who are exhausted even while they are alive/Those who are discouraged/Or are they retreating to the bastions of history/Flag by flag, those who become immortal” It is the month of November, the month of commemorating our immortal comrades. Once again, we face the highest values of the party, we face the cause that is the revolution. We become one with our immortals. We integrate as a vanguard party, becoming one, body and soul. We always have immortal comrades at the forefront of our ongoing struggle. They are the first blow, the first bullet we direct against the enemy. The flag our hands carry and the consciousness inhabiting our minds are the most powerful and invincible weapons of our fight.
We shoulder the fight together and carry it forward, with the flags that are our fallen comrades raised, both towards friends and against foes. And when we observe ourselves, the revolution, the party, the struggle through the mirror of our immortals, we exclaim “Always forward!” We accept the ever-forward revolutionary command that is handed down from the will of our immortals, taking our cue from their call: “Overcome us, comrades, and lead the struggle for revolution and socialism to victory!” We distill the command of “Always forward!” as a revolutionary consciousness from the revolutionary and epic lives of our immortals “in a line”. And we grasp and apply it as a revolutionary philosophy of life, we turn it into an oath of fight. This is how we meet and commune with our fallen once again in November, the time of immortals. Looking into the mirror of their eyes, drawing strength and with the relief of revolutionary belief we say: “Comrades, always forward”, for stopping and pausing is the wound of the revolutionary fight and life.
What does “Always forward” tell us, as communists who have accepted the most meaningful duty and responsibility to fight on behalf of our immortals?
First of all, it commands us to follow in the footsteps of our immortals, to live like them, to fight like them. Those who became immortal in the struggle for revolution and communism have entrusted their cause to those who continue their fight. It calls upon us to shoulder the combat missions they have left vacant. It is but the revolutionary dialectical law of class struggle— the fallen revolutionary is replaced by the fighting soldier. The flag of the revolution, the banner of communism is passed from one hand to the next. The continuity of the fight is ensured by the self-sacrificing actions of those among us who fight within the embrace of life and become immortal. This is how the law of “Always forward” until victory is established.
“Always forward” means walking ahead on a revolutionary path; nothing more than a revolutionary march along the party line. It is the same path and line that our immortals continue to walk on, the revolutionism of dedicated lives. It is the course, the route of revolutionism that leaps forward by remaining evermore revolutionary and organizing revolutionary development. Our immortals are the living proof of progress and development. In the lives of our immortals, we find the revolutionary guidelines for continuing our way forward. It is these very lives and the actions of those who lived them, that we must learn from. It is them, our martyrs, who embody the slogan of “Always forward!”, by taking the lead in their own revolutionary development. Learning from the lives of our immortals is a revolutionary act of high quality, not a merely superficial one. It is a task of both methodological and ideological nature.
The first and fundamental condition for always walking forward in the footsteps of our immortals can be achieved precisely by grasping the revolutionary dialectic given in the lives and actions of our immortals. Within their stories, without exception, we find the dialectics of progress and revolutionary development. Looking at the revolutionary lives of those who have fallen, we see the histories of each and every one of them, their unique and forward-facing development. Regardless of whether their progress is more or less uneven, limited or comprehensive, these stories of revolutionary change and development are very concrete and instructive.
It doesn’t matter whether soldier or a leader. The dialectical law of revolutionary development and progress always operates in the lives of dedicated revolutionaries and shapes their personalities. Whether Marx, Lenin, Mao, Alexandra Kollontai, Clara Zetkin, Che Guevara, Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, Kemal Pir, Bayram Namaz, Yeliz Erbay and many more: when we look at the lives of revolutionary leaders or the stories of tens of thousands of revolutionary fighters, most of whom have become immortal as unsung heroes, we witness the same truth emerging. Revolutionary lives always create themselves through change, development and progress. A revolutionary fighter constructs their existence purposefully, deliberately and consciously. They always organize their development to continue forward and reach above.
Our immortals have always walked forward within a revolutionary tradition and by taking example of those that came before them. They organized their revolutionary development within the context of class struggle and so as to meet its needs. Thus, they have left us very rich examples of revolutionary breaks and leaps. Our immortals, who leapt from limited revolutionism to unlimited revolutionary levels, hand us the compass of revolutionary development.
Comrade Bayram Namaz (Baran Serhat), the “commander of devotion to the immortals”, is such an example, a compass of liberation and leadership. His commitment to the cause, the fight and the immortals in his practice, which he started as a revolutionary soldier and always carried forward, expressed the fundamental revolutionary dialectics of the reality of revolutionary leadership that develops and grows with revolutionary leaps. The inner revolutionary relationship he established with our immortals in his development as a revolutionary leader forms the background of Baran Serhat’s constant progress. His devotion to the immortals was not limited to words, but always came forward in his deeds.
Immortals like Baran Serhat, our revolutionary compass, will always remain, leading our way to always walk forward, following their footsteps. To always move forward, is to hold on tight to the most revolutionary examples who guide us, to make let them be the ropes that allow to climb to the peaks of the fight. It means consciously preparing oneself to shoulder the most challenging, extensive and heavy tasks. It means learning from the self-destruction and self-establishment actions of our immortals. Fighting by learning is learning by fighting.
“Following the footsteps of our immortals”, as we understand it today, is a slogan asking of us to prepare for the concrete and comprehensive revolutionary tasks that we are confronted with. For revolutionaries devoted to the immortals, it means being able to appoint one’s own direction and action, in the wake of any difficult moment and turn. It means being determined like those who came before us. To be courageous and willing to sacrifice as they did.
It means directing towards and locking in on your target like a bullet. To move forward means organizing rupture, leaps and construction within oneself. Moving forward means leaning on the transformative power of criticism and self-criticism, using revolutionary criticism and self-criticism as the engine of revolutionary change and real progress. It is to manage one’s own revolutionary development through progress and change. It means confronting and coming to terms with one’s weaknesses.
It means constantly struggling to overcome the internal obstacles in the way of one’s development. To move forward means to wage a relentless struggle against bureaucratism, the status quo, contentment, apologeticness and conformism, habits which serve as death penalty to a revolutionary, in order renew and achieve the revolutionary leap. It means gaining a higher level of quality by destroying what is given and rebuilding it. To progress means to expand our revolutionary capacities and improve our given qualities. To progress means to delve deeper into our revolutionary development. It means deepening in thought, emotion, labor, party, comradeship, populism and war. It means organizing our revolutionary expectation toward ourselves, self-confidence and energy consciously, multiplying it and then taking the lead in the fight. To progress means to equip oneself with ideo-political, organizational and a variety of other talents and revolutionary virtues. It is to equip and strengthen oneself, the party and the oppressed with the weapons of revolutionary liberation.
Waging our struggle under the conditions of the liquidationist attacks by the political Islamist fascist chief regime, leads us to advance. We walk in the footsteps of our immortals and we fight for the revolution. We are the ones paying the price for this revolution. In the moment of November, we commemorate our immortals as Marxist-Leninist communist fighters, faced with a two-dimensional scope of work. Learning from our immortals, assimilating our revolutionary knowledge and gaining qualifications constitutes our ideo-political working ground. Doing this work, we come face to face with our immortals as communist warriors. We prioritize learning through internal trainings, workshops, grave commemorations, explaining our compass of freedom through writings, and visiting the families of our immortals. As a second aspect of this work, we introduce our immortals to the masses. We bring together the values of our fight with the working class and the oppressed, whether that be in form of tags, home meetings, commemorations or many other forms of action and expression. We aim make the immortals accessible to the masses, however one can encounter them, and organize them as a consciousness. Now is the time for Marxist-Leninist communists to make our immortals the battleflag of the oppressed and to hold tightly to their duty of struggle. Always forward, comrades, in the footsteps of our immortals!
*Editorial of ATILIM newspaper, Voice of the Working Class and the Oppressed, dated November 8, number 141.